Mental Illness in US and China
I think our class spends a lout of time on discussing the history and current situation of mental illness in American society. What I am more interested in is the formation of mental illness. According to Liah Greenfield in her book Mind, Modernity, Madness : The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, she pointed out that mental illness is not a biological problem but more a cultural one; while the malformation of identity leads to mental illness, the modern culture can not provide individuals to acquire a clear understanding between self and society. Therefore, I’d like to start my paper by shifting the discussion of mental illness from a psychiatrical and biological to a cultural one. I will use Greenfield’s theory on culture and mental illness as an introduction and guidance as my paper. First, I will define culture as symbolic reality which is emergent from biological reality. The appearance of mental illness is a result of malfunction of individuals responding to the collective culture. I am also interested in mental illness in different culture, for example, in China. If mental illness is a cultural problem appearing on an individual level, will different cultural environment influence the formation of mental illness? I will research on mental illness in China and see the formation of it and later compare to it in US. Also, if the stigma of having mental illness will influence and further aggravate the illness. Then the cultural perspective on mental illness will become a catalyst in one’s illness. In my paper, I will first define culture as symbolic reality, state that mental illness is a cultural problem instead of a biological one, further I will talk about mental illness in China and in US to see whether different cultural environment will influence the formation of mental illness.
Academic sources:
Mind, Modernity, Madness : The Impact of Culture on Human Experience by Liah Greenfield
Chinese Culture and Mental Health, edited by Wen-Shing Tseng, David Y. H. Wu,
The stigma of mental illness in Asian cultures, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00048679709073848
