Psychiatry

Abstract

Psychiatry in modern China is a complex mixture of knowledge and practice. Its development is neither linear nor autopoietic and is scrambled with social, cultural, and political influences. It consists of infrastructure, knowledge content, and multifold functions in a particular culture. In this chapter, a new tone is set to comment on the history of psychiatry in China not by looking at the expansion of the scientific discipline itself, but by how psychiatry has been employed by different agencies to accomplish dissimilar goals over time. It is assumed that from across three political regimes, psychiatry in China was not developed in close conjunction with modern medicine. Rather, it has been employed or manipulated by various actors to achieve their own goals without notional foundations. Its unique features: the absence of a complete teaching and learning curriculum, the lack of a systematic training system, and the absence of a substantial intellectual foundation on which to develop practical applications availed itself to become ideal tools for satisfying the informational demands of different actors in the social worlds in which they were applied. Despite recent governmental and professional efforts to regulate the discipline and practice, psychiatry still remains heterogeneous in its content, immature in its infrastructure, and pliable with respect to its various functions, which I call the science multiple.