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Historical Reflections on Mental Health and Illness: India, Japan, and the West

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The Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health

Abstract

This chapter reflects on how modern concepts of mental health and illness emerged in India and Japan both through dialogue with Western paradigms and practices and by drawing on cultural inheritances and sociopolitical conditions—especially in the context of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. A comparative analysis of the Indian and Japanese contexts illuminates five themes in particular of interest in understanding Global Mental Health: dilemmas over how imported Western categories of knowledge can be made to fit with long-standing local ones; the role of cultural nationalism in encouraging local innovations in mental health practice, and frustrating the progress of foreign counterparts; a tendency to use the prevalence of mental illness in society—whether documented or presumed—as a means of critiquing Western modernity and its ill effects; tensions between state policy/provision and private entrepreneurship in catering for psychological and emotional suffering; and the importance of social, and especially family, structures and relationships in determining which sorts of experiences and patterns of behaviour are most readily labelled as ‘illness’ and those which are not.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Patel and Prince (2010). On some of the concerns raised about these initiatives, see Campbell and Burgess (2012).

  2. 2.

    My use of ‘psy-disciplines’ is inspired by the work of Nikolas Rose (1999), who has popularized the use of the term in English.

  3. 3.

    On ‘auto-orientalism’, see Befu (2001). See also Dale (1986).

  4. 4.

    On Kure, see Okada (1982); on the relationship between government and psychiatrists in Japan, see Matsumura (2004); Suzuki (2003).

  5. 5.

    See the discussions in Kitanaka (2011), on the historical relationships in Japan—down to the present day—between government ministries, courts, businesses, and psychiatrists.

  6. 6.

    A Professor of Psychiatry at Tokyo University admitted as much in 1924. See Kitanaka (2011), p. 35.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Christopher Harding

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  1. Christopher Harding
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, Health and Society University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Ross G. White

  2. School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Sumeet Jain

  3. Department of Social Work and Social Care, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

    David M.R. Orr

  4. CERMES3, Paris, France

    Ursula M. Read

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Harding, C. (2017). Historical Reflections on Mental Health and Illness: India, Japan, and the West. In: White, R., Jain, S., Orr, D., Read, U. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39510-8_4

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