ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Politicization Postponed: Political Depression as an Afterlife of Neurasthenia in Contemporary China

• In Event: Transcultural Psychiatry and the Sinophone Pacific

English Abstract

This paper revisits Arthur Kleinman’s Hunan study of neurasthenia (shenjing shuairuo) in the early 1980s to illuminate what I call a postponed politicization of psychiatric suffering in China, visible today in the rise of the Internet buzzword “political depression” (zhengzhi yiyu or zhengzhi xing yiyu). In medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry, Kleinman’s Social Origins of Distress and Disease has often been read through the lens of cross-cultural difference—showing how Chinese patients express psychological distress somatically. The study, however, carries a different kind of significance. Conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, it offered one of the first ethnographic accounts of the psychological consequences of Maoist high socialism, explicitly foregrounding their “social origins.” In that conjuncture, the obsolete diagnosis of neurasthenia functioned both as a cornerstone for imagining a distinctively Chinese psychiatry and as a vehicle for asking how social and political forces cause and configure suffering—ambitions that were later eclipsed by the global consolidation of biomedical models and the growing dominance of “depression” as a diagnostic category in China. Juxtaposing Kleinman’s early meditations on neurasthenia and today’s online discussions of “political depression,” I argue that the popularization of this new idiom signals a belated, vernacular return to the questions his study posed—questions that continue to resonate in China’s contemporary history.

Author

• Hsuan-Ying Huang, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University