However, were forced to undergo struggle sessions, beatings and self-criticisms Those who refused to denounce their heterodox viewpoints, ‘psychiatry and psychiatrists became superfluous’, and treatment was denied to those Hospital once they voiced orthodox political views. May have genuinely suffered from psychiatric disorders were released from the Mentally ill and detained indefinitely in psychiatric wards. Politically non-conformist individuals were frequently diagnosed as severely Psychiatry quickly became the handmaiden of political persecution. Under the auspices of Human Rights Watch, provides one of the most detailedĭepictions of these abuses to date. Institutionalized under the Maoist regime. Literature’ began to expose the abuses suffered by those who had been Once the Cultural Revolution drew to a close, however, a flood of memoirs and ‘scar Like-minded contemporaries, who similarly championed the ‘new psychiatry’ emerging Their observations would go on to shape the views of many Teachings, generating a community ethos, and nurturing a sense of ‘revolutionaryġ973: 162–3). Zedong, which they described as consisting of productive labour, reading Maoist They remained generally optimistic at the state of mental healthcare under Mao Opportunity to visit China as part of an officially sponsored delegation in 1971 andġ972. The physician Victor Sidel and the psychiatric social worker Ruth Sidel, who had the Their observations ‘cannot be considered to be typical’ ( Pearson, 2014: 158). – the Shanghai Number One Hospital and the Beijing Medical College Third Hospital – Medical delegations only toured two of the foremost psychiatric facilities in China ‘generally purveyed the party line, and were uncritical’. Written by individuals who had suffered tremendously at the hands of the socialistīoth of the above perspectives suffer from obvious biases, albeit of different kinds.Īs Veronica Pearson has pointed out, reports written by sympathetic foreigners 7), and later memoirs and testimonies, many of which were Of the CCP who were invited on guided tours to China in the early 1970s ( Kagan, 1972 Livingston and Lowinger,ġ973: ch. Know about Cultural Revolution-era psychiatry has been comprised of two differentīut equally problematic streams of data: observations recorded by foreign ‘friends’ Narratives on the basis of piecemeal and unreliable sources. Researchers either skip over this decade-long interval or patch together partial Treatment during the last years of the Maoist regime. Obstacles for those hoping to examine the contours of psychiatric study and To date, the Cultural Revolution has posed steep – and in some cases insurmountable – Revolution has been, and continues to be, almost a complete blank ( Huang and Kirsner, 2020: 6 Of related archives, our knowledge of psychiatric treatment during the Cultural As a consequence of heightened censorship and the closure ![]() Humiliation of intellectuals and political elites, and a descent in many regions Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a period marked by brutal violence, the ![]() This has been doubly true for the decade-long movement known as the Great ![]() Inroads into exploring the vicissitudes of Chinese mental health practice during With only a few exceptions ( Gao, 2015, 2019, 2020 Wang, 2019b), scholars have not made many Twentieth century, the period between 19 – an era marked by theĮstablishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the rise to power of theĬhinese Communist Party (CCP), and the leadership of Mao Zedong – has been a ratherīarren terrain for historians of psychiatry. In contrast to the rich studies that have proliferated on the first half of the Republican (1911–49) periods, a time when Chinese intellectuals and statesmen wereĮxperimenting with the adoption and implementation of foreign modes of health Vast majority of these studies have centred on the late Qing (1644–1911) and Vocabularies, treatments and psychiatric epistemologies ( Baum, 2018 Li and Schmiedebach, 2015 Ma, 2014 Shapiro, 2014 Szto, 2014 Wang, 2019a Wu and Wang, 2016). Topics as the rise of Chinese asylums and psychopathic hospitals, local idioms ofĭistress, and the role played by foreign missionaries in instituting new Increasing interest in the history of public health, scholars have explored such In recent years, historians have begun to turn their attention to the long-neglected
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |