Mental Health in China (Jie Yang)

Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 2021

This chapter examines the notion of therapy and its growing significance in the social, political, and affective life in China during the last four decades. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the languages, ideas, and practices of psychology have been applied to various domains for different purposes and imperatives including addressing the current mental health epidemic. This therapeutic ethos acts as both a mode of thinking and imagination. Since therapy suggests an illness or disease and it encompasses a dual process that both diagnoses (identifies an issue) and prescribes (offers solutions), this understanding can thus be easily appended to governance, problematizing (pathologizing, thus individualizing) social issues, and then proposing solutions. This mode of therapeutic governing involves a unique mode of psychologization in China, in which psychological expertise can be dispensed by non-experts with real consequences. It centers on the management of subjectivity. This mode of therapeutic governing accesses people's subjectivity through "care" and "permissive empathy" that renews the government's role as the "guardian of the people". This chapter contends that the ways this therapeutic ethos involved in Chinese society manifest the implicit complicity among therapy, the state, and market.

In this article, I explore how and why psychological intervention, often in the name of guanai (care), has gradually become a critical tool of managing the population and governing society in postsocialist China. Psychological counselors and experts are becoming a new form of authority, an indispensable part of creating and managing knowable, stable, and governable subjects for the military, the police, schools, and enterprises. 'Therapeutic governing' refers to the adoption of the therapeutic ethos, techniques, and care to improve the management of the work force and to help individuals cope with life in a rapidly changing society. I examine what drives local authorities to pursue this change, and how therapeutic governing takes on a different character and significance given China's unique path. I suggest that incorporating psychotherapeutic intervention into postsocialist governing can simultaneously produce disciplining and nurturing, repressive and unfettering effects in everyday life.

2000

Around the world, in high- and low-income countries alike, mental illness and high-risk behaviors contribute to profound suffering and loss at the level of the individual and the state. In the case of China as in other developing countries, gains made in the areas of economics, technology, education, and overall standard of living are being offset by a rise in

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 study focuses on ‘manufactured mentally ill’ (bei jingshenbing, 被精神病) individuals in post-socialist China. In Chinese society, bei jingshenbing is a neologistic catchphrase that refers to someone who has been misidentified as exhibiting symptoms of mental illness and has been admitted to a mental hospital. Specifically, it refers to those individuals who were subjected to unnecessary psychiatric treatment during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on archival analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this study addresses the ways in which the voices of bei jingshenbing victims and those who support them reveal China’s experiences with psychiatric modernity. It also discusses the active role of these individuals in knowledge production, medical policymaking, and the implications for reforming the psychiatric and mental health systems in post-socialist China.

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2020

This article examines families’ involvement in the care and management of people with serious mental illnesses in China, and focuses on how that involvement is shaped by changing psychiatric institutions and law. Drawing on 32 months of fieldwork, I show that familial involvement is primarily characterised by guan [管], which can mean ‘care’ and/or ‘control’, and which commonly invokes a particular cultural ideal of parenting. Tracing how the language and practice of guan circulate between different realms, I argue that a ‘biopolitical paternalism’ has emerged in contemporary China. It reduces patients to carriers and manifestations of biomedical/security risk and legitimises the state’s policy of population management as a form of paternalistic intervention, while displacing certain paternalistic responsibilities, such as hospitalisation and ensuring medication compliance, onto patients’ families. This biopolitical paternalism produces vulnerabilities and unease within families and aggravates health disparities between patients. The analytic of biopolitical paternalism has conceptual efficacy and practical implications beyond mental health.

The breathless pace of market reform in China has brought about profound ruptures in socioeconomic structures and increased mental distress in the population. In this context, more middle-class urbanites are turning to nascent psychological counseling to grapple with their problems. This article examines how Chinese psychotherapists attempt to ''culture'' or indigenize (bentuhua) three imported psychotherapy models in order to fit their clients' expectations, desires, and sensibilities: the Satir family therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and sandplay therapy. It addresses three interrelated questions: What is the role of culture in adopting, translating, and recasting psychotherapy in contemporary China? How is cultural difference understood and mobilized by therapists in the therapeutic encounter? What kind of distinct therapeutic relationship is emerging in postsocialist China? Data presented here are drawn from my semistructured interviews and extensive participant observation at various counseling offices and psychotherapy workshops in the city of Kunming. My ethnographic account suggests that it is through constant dialog, translation, and re-articulation between multiple regimes of knowledge, cultural values, and social practices that a new form of talk therapy with ''Chinese characteristics'' is emerging. Finally, I reflect upon what this dialogic process of transformation means for psychotherapy as a form of globally circulating knowledge/practice.

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.

Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 2023

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a boom of popular participation in psychotherapy and training in urban China, which has attracted the attention of anthropologists who called this phenomenon a "psycho-boom" or "psy fever." This article is a review of anthropological studies on this issue and discusses how psychotherapeutic knowledge and practice with western origin has been indigenized by Chinese psychotherapists as well as the emergence of a new form of self in this psycho-boom. Critical anthropologists tend to emphasize the connection between this psy fever and governmentality. This article shows the insights and blind spots of this perspective, calling for attention to the heterogeneity and agency of participants in this psy fever as well as the potentiality of psychotherapy as both expression and intervention for sufferings in the context of drastic social transformation.