Mental Health

In this article, we examine the development of mental health—as a concept, a movement, and a broad interdisciplinary field that originated in the West—in China over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Taking the international history as the reference point, we begin our narrative with the arrival of mental hygiene—the predecessor of mental health—in the Republican period. Then we delineate how the Chinese history departed from the post-war shift to mental health during the Maoist period, followed by an account on the renewed development that has slowly come closer to the international trends in the post-reform period. Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of psy disciplines (including psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy) and the interplay between these bodies of knowledge and the country’s social and political realities. Paying attention to terminology, we also describe how key concepts like mental health and mental hygiene are translated into Chinese.