Unruly Minds
An International Workshop at NTU, Singapore
Abstracts
Demonic Afflictions in Late Imperial China
CHEN, Hsiu-fen
National Cheng-Chi University
My paper is an attempt to explore the fruitful ambiguities of scholarly doctors’ attitudes towards ‘demonic afflictions’ in late Imperial China, in particular during the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin with, it introduces a category of illnesses, namely, xiesui (literally trans. ‘evil influences’) as recorded in numerous pre-modern Chinese medical texts. Some physicians tended to view xiesui in terms of environmental factors. Others, on the contrary, claimed that xiesui is caused by ‘ghosts and deities’. These demonic afflictions can be divided further into various kinds, ranging from that of deities, spirits, goblins, animal fairies, ghosts, and ‘worms-transmitted’ ailments. Meanwhile, the ‘polluted’ locations where demonic afflictions likely occur are also taken into account. Despite their contradictory interpretations of aetiology, the physicians seem to have agreeable stance: xiesui as exterior pathogens can only attack people whose body and mind are weak and vulnerable. Moreover, they can be examined by classic diagnostic methods and therefore cured by medicinal treatments. The typical recipes those physicians used include drug decoctions, needling/acupuncture, burning incense/moxibustion, etc. Sometimes ointments were applied to the sexual organs of the sufferers in the cases of ‘demonic sexual obsession’. Occasionally, the therapeutics with strong shamanistic implications, such as charms, spells and prayers, might also apply. In short, xiesui as illnesses can be seen as an alternative way of thinking about madness in pre-modern China. The medicalization of their treatments not only reveals the changing boundaries between the natural and supernatural worlds. It also helps to characterise the medicine of mental health in an era when both psychiatry and psychology were absent.
Mental Health in Republican China
Wen-Ji WANG
National Yang Ming University
With the advent of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and other psy disciplines in China in the first decades of the twentieth century, new ways were experimented to understand and develop the self. Drawing on the writings of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers and other experts in the 1920s-40s China, the present study explores the images of the self constructed by these psy experts and their social concerns so as to further understand the Chinese society in the Republican era. In particular, the study foregrounds the relationship between the mental health movement and the contemporary trend of ‘reforming national character,’ and the cooperation as well as conflicts between various psy disciplines in terms of their different views on psychological thinking.
‘The Chinese are the most persistently suicidal’: Mental Illness in Colonial Singapore
Loh Kah Seng
Institute for East Asian Studies, Sogang University
Abstract
British policy in the colonial entrepot of Singapore, which had a majority Chinese immigrant population (largely male and working class) both in the mental asylum and in general, was modernising yet marginal. On the one hand, the passing of legislation originating from Britain, practice of Western psychiatry, institutionalisation of mental sufferers in asylums, and enforcement of various socio-economic regimes among patients amounted to a colonial attempt to classify, subjugate and engineer Chinese mental patients towards the creation of a racialised and modern subject. As the medical superintendent of the asylum declared in 1896, ‘the Chinese are without exception, when suicidal, the most persistently suicidal of any of the numerous races with whom I have had any dealings’. But British efforts were undermined by colonial neglect and policy contradictions, such as the long-running failure to cope with rising admissions and the involuntary repatriation, transfer and return of patients. They were also thwarted by Chinese cultures of healing and patient responses within the asylum, exemplified in the avoidance of psychiatric care and institutionalisation, the incidence of patient suicide and escape and passive resistance towards productive work. The Singapore case offers a way to consider the history of mental illness within the framework of British colonial rule that was authoritarian yet frequently inept, but also reveals, beneath of veneer of imperial hegemony, the agency and resistance of immigrant Chinese subalterns to psychiatry and the engineering of patients.
Entering the Green Mountain:
The Cultural History of “Madness”in Hong Kong
Li, Yungeng Yogo & Lam, Yanyan Cherry
Chinese University Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, “Entering the Green Mountain” (Translated literally from the Cantonese:入青山 ) is widely used to mean that someone has gone crazy. “Green Mountain” refers to Castle Peak Hospital, the earliest (since 1961) and most well-known mental hospital in Hong Kong.
Our research project is a collaboration between The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Castle Peak Hospital. The project aims to explicate the constantly transforming cultural conception of “madness” in Hong Kong.
In this workshop, two sets of the preliminary findings of the project will be presented. One concerns the entangled co-development of Castle Peak Hospital and the images of mental illness in Hong Kong media since the 1980s. Three successive episodes of Hong Kong Connection (鏗鏘集) produced by Radio Television Hong Kong are analyzed in detail. In response to both the sensational social events and the transformation of mental health care from asylum mode to rehabilitation mode, media narratives on mental illness steadily shift from “whom to blame” to “nothing to fear”. However, media narration of mental illnesses still has to abide by the “mental illness is an illness like any other” approach, which is favored by mental health care practitioners. The narrative inequality between people with mental illness and mental health care institutions leads to the reinforcing stigmatization of mental illness.
The other set of findings concerns the participatory ethnography of a philanthropic photography teaching project organized for recovering psychotic patients at Castle Peak Hospital. The transformation of visual competence, as an aspect of cultural capital, will be studied. This research will tell us whether visual competence has a special place in our late modern era, when visuality is a prevalent element of social relations, to empower the mentally-ill who live in the community as an underprivileged group.
The Globalization of Koro:
Chineseness Deterritorialized and Reterritorialized
Howard Chiang
University of Warwick
Listed as a culture-bound syndrome in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), koro refers to a person’s overpowering belief that his genitalia is retracting and even disappearing. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Western biomedicalization of koro recast Chinese culture itself as a source of this pathology and an important arbiter for its contemporary psychologization and understanding. Starting in the 1970s, psychiatrists began to discover on a more frequent basis cases of koro outside Chinese East Asia. Reports of koro came from all over the world—Great Britain, France, Canada, the United States, India, Georgia, Yemen, and Nigeria. These findings pushed Western and non-Western psychiatrists alike to acknowledge the increasing need to engage with anthropological perspectives in order to fully understand the development of certain mental health problems in culturally saturated contexts. Most recently, the genital-theft panic in Western African nations in the 1990s posed a significant challenge to the move to a universal set of genital retraction disorders, a tendency encouraged by the “tightening up” of the DSM. The desire for more standardized diagnostic criteria, more systematic clinical practices, and fewer case histories compelled some mental health experts to elevate culture-bound syndromes to a more general family of psychiatric illness. This reorganization culminated in 1990, when two faculties at Boston University, Ruth Bernstein and Albert Gaw, proposed a new classification scheme for the forthcoming DSM-IV. In 1994, Chinese koro officially entered the DSM-IV as the “true” koro model for understanding other culture-bound syndromes in modern psychiatry.
Madness Made in China:
Manufacturing Mental Disorders and the Incomplete Medical Modernity
Harry Yi-Jui Wu
Nanyang Technological University
After more than two decades of painstaking legislation process, on 1st of May, 2013, the Mental Health Law was finally administrated in China. The adoption of such law at the state level is hoped not only to adjust the potential political abuse of psychiatry, but also to popularise community mental health services, regulate professional and disciplinary functions of psychiatric science, and provide legal grounds for appropriate psychiatric treatments. Such move not only responded psychiatrists’ call for a sturdy mental health system but also professed China’s aspiration to benchmark the universal values of human rights and medical ethics. Right before the administration of Mental Health Law, however, a neologistic catchphrase bei jingshenbing (被精神病), which refers to the experience of being misidentified as having symptoms of mental illness resulting in mental hospital admission either for humanitarian or malice intention, suddenly became a buzzword in the media either online or in press. Using historical accounts obtained from the Beijing Municipal Archives, historical and contemporary Chinese medical periodicals and oral interviews collected during my fieldwork in multiple sites with clinical psychiatrists, public defenders, human right activists and individuals who had experiences of bei jingshenbing, this paper attempts to draw an overall picture of the misappropriation of psychiatry in 20th Century China from social, cultural, economic, legal and medical perspectives, arguing that the rapid spread of “bei-jingshenbing” in contemporary Chinese society has not only reflected the fear among Chinese people of the punitive nature of psychiatry abut also their growing credence in scientific health governing during the years of social change. It further reveals the disjunctive acceleration of medical modernity in China concerning the struggle between adopting the international classification of mental disorders and ‘manufacturing’ culturally-sensitive disease categories catering to local needs. Finally, this paper examines various scholarly and media discussions about ‘bei-jingshenbing’ in the context of China’s rapid capitalization, the pursuit of equity and justice among disfranchised citizens and the challenge faced by policy makers regarding mental health reform.
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