Towards a History of Manufactured Mental Disorders in Post-Socialist China

On the blog today we have a guest post from Harry Wu, giving us background and insights into his Medical History article ‘The Moral Career of ‘Outmates’: Towards a History of Manufactured Mental Disorders in Post-Socialist China’, which appeared in the special issue: ‘Tales from the Asylum. Patient Narratives and the (De)construction of Psychiatry)’ https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2015.70

Harry writes: My article deals with an unusual but popular concept regarding the development of modern psychiatry in China. Bei jingshenbing, a Mandarin neologism in referring to ‘manufactured mentally ill’, was a catch phrase appearing in China in the first decade of the 21st Century. The term was coined to describe conditions of involuntary psychiatry treatment or admission due to unjustifiable, and often non-medical reasons.

Since I began to conduct research into the history of psychiatry, I have been particularly interested in the development of the discipline in the Chinese-speaking world. In the monograph that I am currently working on, I look at how theories and methods of social psychiatry have been jointly framed at the World Health Organization (WHO) by scientists, visionary European thinkers, as well as technocrats from the non-western world. However, the project in the WHO did not include People’s Republic of China, since psychiatry was suspended by the Chinese government during the period of the Cultural Revolution.

After coming back to work in Asia, I took the opportunity to take a closer look at the discipline of psychiatry in China in the neglected years. And I found that the story of psychiatry in China during this period cannot be examined under the existing historiographic frameworks, such as the East-West comparison or localisation of the modern western psychiatry. Chinese psychiatry, in fact, evolved in the complex web weaved together in the emerging strands of medical, economic, political, and legal infrastructures during the period of the building of the modern state. In these fields, psychiatry means different and it functions in very different ways for different stakeholders.

The general readers may think that the term is burdened with a heavy political connotation. The negative comments on Chinese psychiatry proliferated, while Human Rights workers began to report on the likely confinement of Falungung practitioners in the 1990s. But my research has found that the misfortune of unjustifiable psychiatric admissions occurred under circumstances when the aforementioned modernization projects failed to evenly mature.

The publication time of this article coincided the implementation of China’s Mental Health Law, which aspired to remove the stigma of mental patients and decrease the situation of human rights violations regarding psychiatric care. I hope that my article can contribute an alternative analytical framework for historians who writes about modern psychiatry in post-socialist China.

Harry Wu