Papers by Hsuan-Ying Huang
History of Psychiatry, 2022
This article examines the fragmentation of entry-level training in China's psycho-boom since the ... more This article examines the fragmentation of entry-level training in China's psycho-boom since the state terminated its certification for psychological counsellors in 2017. Initially, the policy change was perceived as the end of an era marked by rapid yet disorderly development. The stringent state regulation that many people anticipated, however, did not occur. The certification's ending turned out to be a moment of reshuffling that gave existing key players-including the Registry System under the Chinese Psychological Society, other quasi-official organizations and their partners in the training industry, and digital start-up companies-a new chance to vie for growth and dominance in the space it left behind. The heat of the psycho-boom continues, as do the chaos and struggles within it.
European Neurology, 2010
The present note provides an overview of the historical development of neurology and its current ... more The present note provides an overview of the historical development of neurology and its current status in the People’s Republic of China, against the backdrop of the current massive transformation of Chinese society. We trace the origins of neurology in China to missionary medicine during the Republican period (1911–1949), and describe how the discipline grows with difficulty throughout the subsequent decades (1950–1976). We then introduce an influential legacy of the post-revolutionary period, the ideal of integrating traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine, and briefly describe recent efforts to modernize medical education and training. Finally, we provide a brief overview of topics in neurology and neuropsychiatry that have a ‘Chinese face’, last but not least the successful integration of TCM and Western medicine in the treatment of hepatolenticular degeneration/Wilson’s disease.
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2020
This article provides an overview of the development of psychoanalysis in China based on literatu... more This article provides an overview of the development of psychoanalysis in China based on literature and personal observations. We situate this history in the context of the cognate disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, all of which are shaped by the massive political and social transformations of modern and contemporary China. Our account starts with a preliminary beginning prior to 1949, which fell largely outside the clinical domain. What follows is a brief description of how this nascent development was extinguished under three decades of radical socialism. The main part of the article deals with the post-reform period that began in the late 1970s, as the introduction of Western psychotherapy and psychoanalysis became possible again after the Cultural Revolution. Emphasis is placed on the past 15 years or so, a period known for an explosive growth of professional and popular interests in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology in China’s major cities.
In China, the rise of e-commerce has made significant impacts on a broad range of business and p... more In China, the rise of e-commerce has made significant impacts on a broad range of business and professional fields; psychotherapy, a profession born of the recent “psycho-boom” (xinli re 心理热), is one of them. This article, using materials collected from interviews, participant observation, and media accounts, delineates the development of Jiandan xinli (简单心理), a Beijing-based startup that features an e-commerce platform for psychotherapy services, and explicates how and why it has achieved enormous initial success. Drawing on the insights of anthropological studies of infrastructure, it argues that the platform can be conceptualised as an example of “infrastructural entrepreneurship,” a business practice taking the construction of infrastructure—in this case, for the field of psychotherapy—as its primary mission.
This article focuses on the psychotherapy debate in China that was triggered by the country’s men... more This article focuses on the psychotherapy debate in China that was triggered by the country’s mental health legislation. Seeing the release of the draft Mental Health Law in 2011 as a “diagnostic event” (Moore in Am Ethnol 14(4):727–736, 1987), I examine the debate in order to unravel the underlying logic and ongoing dynamics of the psycho-boom that has become a conspicuous trend in urban China since the early 2000s. Drawing on my fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, I use the two keywords of the debate—“jianghu” (literally “rivers and lakes”), an indigenous term that evokes an untamed realm, and “profession,” a foreign concept whose translation requires re-translation—to organize my delineation of its contours. I describe how anticipation of state regulation prompted fears and discontents as well as critical reflections and actions that aimed to transform the field into a profession. The efforts to mark out a professional core against the backdrop of unruly jianghu further faced the challenge of an alternative vision that saw popularization as an equally noble cause. The Mental Health Law came into effect in 2013; ultimately, however, it did not introduce substantive regulation. Finally, I discuss the implications of this debate and the prospects of the psycho-boom.
This article provides a historical overview of the development of Western psychotherapy in China ... more This article provides a historical overview of the development of Western psychotherapy in China based on existing scholarship and my own ethnography. I describe a meandering trajectory embedded in the shifting political, social, and economic circumstances: the tentative beginning in the Republican period, the transmutation and destruction in the Maoist period, the relatively slow recovery and progress in the earlier reform period, and the eruption of the psycho-boom in the new millennium. Emphasis is placed on the reform period that began in the late 1970s, but by incorporating the previous periods I intend to show that the long-term process is highly relevant to the current psycho-boom. I further reveal that the development of psychotherapy in China has involved a dual processboth the building of this new profession and the infiltration of related ideas into the broader society-and that this duality is particularly evident in the recent psycho-boom. Finally, I discuss the implications of the new Mental Health Law and the preliminary signs that psychotherapy as a profession is taking root in urban China.
The present note provides an overview of the historical development of neurology and its current ... more The present note provides an overview of the historical development of neurology and its current status in the People's Republic of China, against the backdrop of the current massive transformation of Chinese society. We trace the origins of neurology in China to missionary medicine during the Republican period , and describe how the discipline grows with difficulty throughout the subsequent decades . We then introduce an influential legacy of the post-revolutionary period, the ideal of integrating traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Western medicine, and briefly describe recent efforts to modernize medical education and training. Finally, we provide a brief overview of topics in neurology and neuropsychiatry that have a 'Chinese face', last but not least the successful integration of TCM and Western medicine in the treatment of hepatolenticular degeneration/Wilson's disease.
Teaching Documents by Hsuan-Ying Huang
Book Reviews by Hsuan-Ying Huang
Since the turn of the century, China has witnessed an unprecedented growth in mental health servi... more Since the turn of the century, China has witnessed an unprecedented growth in mental health services, an area that received little attention from the state or society in the first two decades of the economic reform. With the advance of a state-initiated reform that focuses on the public psychiatric system, and a psychotherapy boom that caters to the middle-class populations in cities, the gloomy picture witnessed by pioneering scholars like Arthur Kleinman, Veronica Pearson, Michael Phillips, and Sing Lee in the 1980s and 1990s has slowly receded from view. Looming on the horizon is a vibrant, dynamic, and complicated scene awaiting the investigation of a new generation of researchers. Published in 2017, Jie Yang's Mental Health in China is a timely addition to the inchoate scholarship on this evolving landscape. Based on a review of academic and popular literature and the author's fieldwork experiences, the book offers a concise and comprehensive introduction to mental health in China today. This admirable work comes with an insightful frame-what Yang calls "therapeutic governance"-that purports to explain the wide range of phenomena described in the book. Jie Yang is a cultural anthropologist based at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Initially trained as a linguistic anthropologist, she turned to mental health issues with the arrival of the great transformations mentioned above, yet her works always show a keen sensitivity to language and its permutations. Her first book, Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China, won the Society for East Asian Anthropology's Francis L. K. Hsu Prize in 2016. Based on a decade-long period of research that commenced in the early 2000s on the outskirts of Beijing, it examines how the state sets up counselling services to alleviate the suffering and grievances of former state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers, which constitutes a more benevolent mode of governing. After that, Yang embarked on another major project on "officials' heartache" (guan xinbing)-depression and suicide in China's civil service system-that involves fieldwork in Shandong and Beijing. These two projects provide a solid experiential ground and considerable firsthand material for the current book. Mental Health in China includes seven chapters, sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction brings two recent developments to the fore: a mental health crisis, as shown in the prevalence of mental disorders, and the burgeoning of both popular and professional psychology. It also introduces the overarching concept of therapeutic governance that derives from the scholarship inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Uploads
Papers by Hsuan-Ying Huang
Teaching Documents by Hsuan-Ying Huang
Book Reviews by Hsuan-Ying Huang