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Since the turn of the century, China has witnessed an unprecedented growth in mental health services, an area that received little attention from the state or society in the first two decades of the economic reform. With the advance of a state-initiated reform that focuses on the public psychiatric system, and a psychotherapy boom that caters to the middle-class populations in cities, the gloomy picture witnessed by pioneering scholars like Arthur Kleinman, Veronica Pearson, Michael Phillips, and Sing Lee in the 1980s and 1990s has slowly receded from view. Looming on the horizon is a vibrant, dynamic, and complicated scene awaiting the investigation of a new generation of researchers. Published in 2017, Jie Yang's Mental Health in China is a timely addition to the inchoate scholarship on this evolving landscape. Based on a review of academic and popular literature and the author's fieldwork experiences, the book offers a concise and comprehensive introduction to mental health in China today. This admirable work comes with an insightful frame—what Yang calls “therapeutic governance”—that purports to explain the wide range of phenomena described in the book.
Jie Yang is a cultural anthropologist based at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Initially trained as a linguistic anthropologist, she turned to mental health issues with the arrival of the great transformations mentioned above, yet her works always show a keen sensitivity to language and its permutations. Her first book, Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China, won the Society for East Asian Anthropology's Francis L. K. Hsu Prize in 2016. Based on a decade-long period of research that commenced in the early 2000s on the outskirts of Beijing, it examines how the state sets up counselling services to alleviate the suffering and grievances of former state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers, which constitutes a more benevolent mode of governing. After that, Yang embarked on another major p