Zhiying Ma - Recuperating the Social Person in China
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2019
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On MIA Radio, we interview Anthropologist Zhiying Ma, who explores mental health care in China, including tensions between Western psychiatry and socially-oriented local frameworks.
Zhiying Ma is a cultural and medical anthropologist and disability studies scholar whose work explores the experiences and rights of those receiving mental health services in China. Her current book project, Intimate Institutions: Governance and Care Under the Mental Health Legal Reform in Contemporary China, investigates how the Chinese state has placed paternalistic responsibilities on families through their role in the care of those diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, in part through the practice of involuntary hospitalization.
Ma came to earn a Ph.D. in Anthropology after questioning psychology's overemphasis on decontextualized human behavior while majoring in the subject as an undergraduate. She found that anthropology offered the more humanistic and socially oriented lens she was looking for, and this perspective informs her current work.
Ma collaborates with psychiatrists, social workers, human rights activists, lawmakers, families, and those with lived experience to not only conduct research but also to take part in China's ongoing mental health policy discussions and push for community-based, socially inclusive care that is not simply "care as usual."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Rebecca Trojer, a doctoral student in counseling psychology at UMass, Boston, and a member of the Mad in America website's research news team. |
| 0:25.2 | You can find our daily reports at maddenamerica.com, backslash research dash news. |
| 0:31.7 | Today I'll be speaking with Dr. Zhiyang Ma about her work studying the experiences of those diagnosed with serious mental |
| 0:38.0 | illness in China and the monitoring responsibilities the Chinese state has placed on caregiving |
| 0:43.3 | families. Dr. Ma, who is a cultural and medical anthropologist and disability study scholar |
| 0:49.2 | at the University of Chicago, is currently at work on a book project based on this research, tentatively titled |
| 0:56.1 | Intimate Institutions, Governance and Care Under the Mental Health Legal Reform in Contemporary |
| 1:01.6 | China. We'll be talking about Dr. Ma's book project, as well as her work on psychiatric subjectivity |
| 1:07.8 | and cultural resistance, Western and Chinese models of health, and more. |
| 1:12.8 | Dr. Ma, thank you so much for speaking with me today. |
| 1:15.7 | Thank you for inviting me. |
| 1:17.0 | So I wanted to start by asking you if you could tell us a bit about your current book project. |
| 1:22.3 | What got you interested in this topic and what has stood out to you the most as you've been conducting your fieldwork in China and you've been sitting down to write the book. Thank you. This is a big question. |
| 1:32.2 | My current project, as you very nicely introduced, is about how families in China care for and manage |
| 1:40.1 | people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses and how those family practices have been shaped |
| 1:45.0 | by psychiatric institutions and the country's recent mental health legal reform. I did a whole lot of |
| 1:51.2 | field work for it. I spent over 30 months across the span of eight years doing field work in |
| 1:58.3 | psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, |
| 2:04.0 | human rights agencies, and with families, and patients, et cetera, and also talking to lawmakers |
| 2:11.4 | and leading psychiatrists about the mental health legal reform. So that's the scope of my field work. |
| 2:20.2 | And from that, my main argument of the book is that with the prevalence of involuntary hospitalization, mostly led by patients' families |
... |
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