The Invention of Madness

Baum, Emily

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226580753.001.0001

Cited by 42 publications

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“…Similarly, EmilyBaum (2018) has argued that in early 20th-century Beijing, madness was not a stable, ahistorical entity, but rather constantly 'invented' by different actors in a way that was shaped by the particular social conditions at that time.…”

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confidence: 99%

Promises and perils of Guan

2020

MAT

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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.

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confidence: 99%

Promises and perils of Guan

2020

MAT

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“…Engaging from one site of such mutually implicated geographies, the mediums in Hexian reckon with ghosts from histories near and far—from imperialist encounter to Maoism to the PRC's opening to a globalized economy. Just as the psy‐disciplines have been (and continue to be) innovated, contested, appropriated, and sidestepped by those in China since their importation (Baum, 2018; Chiang, 2015; Huang, 2015; Ma, 2012; Zhang, 2020), mediumship has been (and continues being) transformed as a technique for tarrying with ever‐changing times. Beyond practices in time, mediumship also acts on and as time—registering its lack of coevalness according to developmentalist accounts, mediumship doubles down, so to speak, on its untimeliness, producing a critique of time at once internal to and beyond progressivist demarcations.…”

Section: Psychic Nowheres Ritual Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor

2021

J History Behavioral Science

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This essay reflects on the still-present difficulty in approaching contemporary rural mediumship as coeval with their urban psychotherapeutic counterparts. Drawing on ethnographic work in rural Henan province in central China, I describe how both rurality and spirit mediumship have been rendered anachronistic through national imaginaries, anti-superstition campaigns, and psychiatric discourses. The essay centers on the case of a spirit medium located in the psychiatric unit, and the social evolutionary and developmentalist temporalities condensed in her cultural psychiatric diagnosis. I then turn to the medium's ritual work and cosmological account, which invert mediumship's position in space and time. The essay approaches mediumship's rituals as a form of chronotopic labor, which reworks the spatio-temporal coordinates they inherit from within. It closes by bringing together the conundrums of rural mediumship and those of urban psychotherapeutic and diasporic worlds, to consider psychic landscapes of dislocation, and other formulations of futures to come.

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“…Similar to other medical disciplines (Gao, 2014), diverse schools of psychiatry were practiced in different regions of the country, with no predominant line of thought. For example, although the Department of Neuropsychiatry at the Peking Union Medical College, which was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, became the foremost training center through which numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, and social workers became acquainted with Adolf Meyer’s psychobiology and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, German- and Japanese-styled neuropsychiatry was practiced in other mental hospitals and institutions (Baum, 2013; Shapiro, 1995; Wang, 2016). Nevertheless, even in the late 1940s, neuropsychiatric facilities could only be found in large cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha, Chengdu, and Nanjing, and qualified psychiatrists and neurologists were extremely few (Pearson, 1991).…”

Section: Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene In Republican China And Shanghaimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, the professional interest in developing psychiatry, neurology, and mental hygiene played an equally important part in founding The Mercy Hospital, which was lauded as the most advanced mental institution in East Asia (Běiqiáo pǔcí liáoyǎngyuàn, 1936; Baum, 2013, p. 304). As Halpern envisaged, this institution formed an essential part of a mental hygiene network that would consist of hospitals, child guidance clinics, parents’ clinics, schools for the feeble-minded and problem children, psychotherapy clinics, and training courses for future mental hygiene workers (Caring for the insane in China, 1935).…”

Section: The Mercy Hospital For Nervous Diseasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the past decades, increasing scholarly attention has been paid to the development of psychiatry in modern China. Historians have explored the social and cultural meanings of the rise of modern mental health provision (Baum, 2013; Shapiro, 1995; Szto, 2002), the processes through which diverse bodies of psychiatric and psychological knowledge traveled to and flourished in China (Blowers, 2004; W. Li & Schmiedebach, 2015; Wang, 2016), and the roles of “psy” sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, etc.)…”

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An international teamwork: Mental hygiene in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.

Wang¹

2019

History of Psychology

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Mental hygiene experienced significant growth on an international level in the first half of the 20th century. A concept of American origin, mental hygiene developed into various forms in different cultural and national contexts. With a large international settlement and vibrant cultural activities, Shanghai witnessed a rise of interest in preventing mental illnesses and promoting mental health during the 1930s and early 1940s. The city gradually became one of the most important places for providing mental hygiene services in China. Apart from the establishment of mental hospitals, departments of neuropsychiatry, and child guidance clinics, people from various disciplines, sectors, and nationalities united to deliver health services to the foreign as well as local Chinese population. The present study first examines the social and cultural conditions that made possible, according to contemporary firsthand accounts, this international “teamwork.” Taking the establishment of The Mercy Hospital for Nervous Diseases and the organization of child guidance clinics as examples, this study investigates the ways in which knowledge and practices of different origins were combined and transformed. In contrast to previous depictions of the development of psychiatry and mental hygiene in Republican China as a product of missionary influence, scientific progress, or social control, this study seeks to illuminate the interplay of international and local forces in negotiating the meaning of mental hygiene and creating a flexible public health model characteristic of Shanghai’s political and social makeup.

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The Invention of Madness

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

Promises and perils of Guan

Promises and perils of Guan

Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor

An international teamwork: Mental hygiene in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.

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