Psychiatry and Mental Health in Post-reform China

Forty years of economic reform in China has made the once staunchly socialist country into an economic and military superpower. The same period also witnesses a drastic transformation of the mental health landscape. Based on relevant literature and my ethnographic research, this article offers an overview of the development of psychiatry and mental health services in post-reform China. It begins with the two decades between the launch of economic reform in the late 1970s and the inception of what later became the mental health reform at the turn of the century. This is a period in which the development of mental health services, despite the reorientation of psychiatry toward the West and the restoration of international exchange, remained slow and neglected by the state. Then I describe the two parallel developments that occurred during the first decade of the 2000s: the state-led reform of the public psychiatric system and the market-driven “psycho-boom” that developed outside the system. The former expanded the infrastructure serving and managing people with severe mental illness, and the latter catered to the urban middle class bothered by common mental disorders or piqued by the desire to know themselves better. The last section examines the content and implications of the Mental Health Law that came into effect in 2013, before ending with a brief discussion on recent initiatives and the challenges that the country is still facing in Xi Jinping’s “new era.”