J Hist Med Allied Sci
March 2023
This article examines the pedagogical significance of history workshops as part of the mandatory medical curriculum in Hong Kong. At the University of Hong Kong, year one medical students must take a three-hour long history workshop at the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences. We argue that by immersing experiential museum learning into the official medical curriculum, students can grow interest in Hong Kong's local medical history and discover its spatial relevance to their future practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHist Psychiatry
September 2022
This article explores how 'lunatics' emerged and how they were managed beyond the capacity of institutionalization in colonial Hong Kong in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The story contests the conventional historiography about madmen that focuses on institutions. Unlike in Britain or in other East Asian colonial cities, inpatients stayed at the asylum only for very short periods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study reported domestic and overseas Taiwanese people's perceived stress levels and examined the mediation effect of their coping strategies during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We recruited 2727 Taiwanese respondents from the COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey (N = 173,426) between March 30 and May 30, 2020. The self-report questionnaire included a modified 10-item Perceived Stress Scale and a 16-item coping strategy scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this essay, the author reflects on his past and current research in transnational history psychiatry and the history of lunatics in Hong Kong, attempting to develop an alternative narrative in the unique free port between the East and the West concerning the conventional colonial historiography of psychiatry. He emphasizes that, in Hong Kong, the historiography of psychiatry should broaden its focus and not limited to the role of mental asylums, for modern psychiatry was almost absent in Britain's crown colony until the end of World War II, and custodial care for lunatics was only one temporary measure in a much broader network of patient repatriation. The grand project was designed not for the well-being of the mentally ill but the smooth operation of the international commercial port.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Trauma Dissociation
October 2021
This essay discusses the relationship between film and psychological trauma from the perspective of the history of science. It examines how the psychological sciences were influenced by image technology, primarily after the two world wars. Taking a closer look at the development of film production and mental imagery experiments as cultural and scientific institutions, this essay examines the challenges psychologists began to face when the paradigm of the trauma film was established in the pursuit of positivist evidence informed by mechanical objectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHist Philos Life Sci
April 2021
Although fear and anxiety have gradually become a shared experience in the time of COVID-19, few studies have examined its content from historical, cultural, and phenomenological perspectives concerning the self-awareness and alterity. We discuss the development of the ubiquitous nature of Taijin-kyōfushō (TKS), a subtype of social anxiety disorder (SAD) originated and considered culturally-bound in the 1930s Japan involving fear of offending or displeasing other people. Considering the historical processes of disease classification, advances in cognitive neurosciences, and the need to better understand the content of suffering, psychiatric nosology for SAD still appears controversial and requires further investigations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBy the end of World War II and in the shadow of the Cold War, many Asia-Pacific nations developed their psychiatric disciplines and strengthened their mental health care provision. This article examines the activities of the first generation of psychiatrists in Taiwan during the postwar period, focusing on their self-fashioning during the transition of a medical discipline. At this time, psychiatry was imagined by the state and by professionals as a science serving different clinical and political objectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduces articles in the special issue of , Psychology and Psychiatry in the Global World Part I. The special issue seeks to consolidate and extend the historical analysis of psychology and psychiatry in the global world by bringing together seven articles detailing how theories, techniques, and practices have been translated, adapted, and appropriated in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The contributions demonstrate that it is fruitful to conduct research in the history of psychiatry and psychology together as broader ideational frameworks such as social Darwinism, eugenics, degeneration, and mental hygiene have inspired the development of psychological and psychiatric insights as well as the adoption of their intervention strategies worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. This article reviews the development of medical humanities pedagogies in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
October 2017
This article describes the history of the asbestos use regulation process in Taiwan and the associated factors leading to its total ban in 2018. Despite the long history of asbestos mining and manufacturing since the Japanese colonial period, attempts to understand the impact of asbestos on the health of the population and to control its use did not emerge until the early 1980s. We attempted to investigate the driving forces and obstructions involved in asbestos regulations by reviewing available public sources and scientific journal articles and conducting interviews with key propagators of the asbestos regulation and ban.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study focuses on 'manufactured mentally ill' (bei jingshenbing, [symbol in text]) individuals in post-socialist China. In Chinese society, bei jingshenbing is a neologistic catchphrase that refers to someone who has been misidentified as exhibiting symptoms of mental illness and has been admitted to a mental hospital. Specifically, it refers to those individuals who were subjected to unnecessary psychiatric treatment during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper examines the relationship between 'world citizenship' and the new psychiatric research paradigm established by the World Health Organization in the early post-World War II period. Endorsing the humanitarian ideological concept of 'world citizenship', health professionals called for global rehabilitation initiatives to address the devastation after the war. The charm of world citizenship had not only provided theoretical grounds of international collaborative research into the psychopathology of psychiatric diseases, but also gave birth to the international psychiatric epidemiologic studies conducted by the World Health Organization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: This study provides a systematic review of existing research that has evaluated unique gambling experiences in Taiwan.
Methods: A comprehensive review of electronic databases, including Scopus, PubMed, Chinese Electronic Periodical Services and the Index to Taiwan Periodical Literature System, was conducted to identify evaluations of gambling experiences in Taiwan. Studies that met inclusion criteria were synthesized and assessed.