Introduction: Pow Meng Yap and the culture-bound syndromes

Abstract

PM Yap's most significant intellectual achievement was his development of the concept of the culture-bound syndrome, which synthesized years of research into transcultural psychiatry, and situated this work within this field by drawing on elaborated nosological schema that challenged some of the ethnocentric assumptions made by previous psychiatrists who had tried to understand mental illnesses that presented in non-western cultures. This introduction to Yap's 1951 paper emphasizes that Yap needs to be understood as working within the western tradition of transcultural psychiatry, and argues that his English training and his continual engagement with western psychiatric and philosophical frameworks is the best way to conceive of his contributions to this field. Yap's paper, republished below as the Classic Text, was his first foray into comparative transcultural psychiatry.

Managing Chineseness: neurasthenia and psychiatry in Taiwan in the second half of the twentieth century

“…A global approach to mental health, multidisciplinary collaboration among psychiatry, anthropology and other social sciences, and cultural variations in mental disorders and mental health treatments received increasing attention in the post-WWII period (Bains, 2005; Kirmayer, 2007). In this atmosphere of optimism, scientists from developing countries and former colonies were able to engage in the global production of psychiatric knowledge (Chiang, 2015; Crozier, 2018; Heaton, 2013). Similar to other countries, cultural psychiatry became one of the main developments in Taiwanese psychiatry during this period.…”

“…Just as in the colonial period, culturally related mental conditions attracted the attention of psychiatrists during the post-colonial era (Kirmayer, 2007: 5–8; Simons and Hughes, 1985; Tseng, 2006). This cultural style of thinking also offered a vantage point from which some non-Western medical scientists – Pow Meng Yap from Hong Kong, for example – were able to examine locally found illnesses outside of the framework of Anglo-European psychiatry (Crozier, 2018). As a multi-ethnic society undergoing turbulent social, political and population changes, Taiwan between the 1940s and 1980s also provided distinctive psychiatric conditions for its homegrown investigators.…”

“…Apart from enriching the history of neurasthenia in East Asia, the present study also aims to contribute to the rising scholarly work on the development of transcultural psychiatry. While there is a proliferation of studies on the contacts between modern psychiatry and non-Western subjects in post-colonial contexts (Bains, 2005;Delille and Crozier, 2018), the research so far, with a few exceptions (Chiang, 2015;Crozier, 2018;Heaton, 2013Heaton, , 2018Wu, 2016), have largely been focused on the 'western part' of these histories (Delille, 2016(Delille, , 2018Engstrom and Crozier, 2018). A study of the role played by East Asian medical scientists in the development of cultural psychiatry may lead to a better understanding of the ways in which complex geopolitical factors were involved in the production of psychiatric knowledge.…”

Decolonizing madness? Transcultural psychiatry, international order and birth of a ‘global psyche’ in the aftermath of the Second World War

“…Yap still prioritized the Western medical explanatory framework, and his use of the concept of 'culture-bound syndromes' to describe exclusively non-European 'exotic' phenomena and disorders set up Western illnesses as, by implication, 'culture-free'. 66 It was not until the 1980s and 1990s, after the emergence of the critical discourses of the 'new cross-cultural psychiatry', that the global position of this Eurocentric psychiatric epistemology began to be challenged. In Julian Leff's caustic summary of this new anthropologically minded approach to transcultural psychiatry, 'it generates a view of psychiatry as a cultural product of Western societies in the same way as are the diatonic scales and Coca-Cola'.…”

Castration fever: On trans, China, and psychoanalysis

“…On Peking Union Medical College itself, see Bullock (1980). 8 For an example of this flawed and dated interpretation, see Crozier (2018).…”