China Social Science Review

No.2, 2023

Rethinking Psychiatry in the Anthropological “Field”

(Abstract)

Li Rongrong

Anthropological research can be used to improve the understanding of mental health and modern biological psychiatry. Whether it is focusing on the narrative of suffering and subjective experience, or exploring doctors’ perceptions of illness and the formation of their medical skills; whether it is exploring the social roots of mental suffering, or extending research from suffering to care; anthropological research reveals the real existence of mental suffering while reflecting on the medicalized single-mindedness of biopsychiatry that ignores the life world and social context behind illness. Today, with the emergence of social psychiatry that focuses on the whole population, anthropological research can provide a deep narrative for modern understanding of mental health that is different from the pathologized representations of biopsychiatry, and it can also enrich and modify the strong constructivism of mental illness as an exclusively social construct by focusing on individual experiences in the medical field. A review of relevant anthropological research helps us to understand the multiple dimensions of mental suffering as a bodily, medical, social, and historical fact in a broader context.