In her new book Anxious China, Li Zhang documents the rise of “psy fever” in the 21st-century China, as manifested in the widespread use of psychotherapeutic knowledge and techniques by the country’s middle-class citizens to understand and remake themselves. Traversing diverse spaces ranging from clinics to companies, from universities to militaries, Zhang shows us that psychotherapies, though imported from …
This article is part of the following series: Disability from the South: Toward a Lexicon
If you spend any time in a psychiatric hospital in China, you will likely be struck by the fact that most of the inpatients there have been hospitalized against or regardless of their will, usually by their family members. In China, although families have long been involved in the lives of mentally ill patients, the ways in which they are …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology