Abstract
This chapter builds on one that was published in 2008. The chapter explores the patient’s personal experience (or experiencing, to use a more technical term) of schizophrenia in the context of a changing Chinese society in the 1990s, and presents a few important aspects of clinical sociology. The primary aim of this action-research project was to experiment with clinical sociology as an approach that can be applied to the experience of severe mental illness with all its complexity: the personal, interpersonal, organizational, social, political, and cultural dimensions. The second objective was to offer a perspective that would take into account the context of modern urban China. Some basic concepts are thus explored such as person and experience; society; and social rehabilitation. The methodology was based on interviews with 20 patients and related people (family, professionals, work leaders) using a heuristic conceptual grid for the capture of the essentials of the involved social practices. Four cases of patients are then presented to illustrate the whole process. Some results from our analysis support the main thesis: clinical sociology could be an alternative tool for rehabilitation intervention in the field of psychiatry research and treatment.
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Notes
- 1.
All in all, one is confronted with an important epistemological and social problem as it is not possible to separate “learned” people who would know, understand and explain the social world, from those, who would only be able to express naïve or even mistaken representations about their own experiences.
- 2.
The reader must bear in mind that the Chinese work unit (danwei) is the first level of the Communist Party organization: the work unit is not same employer it would be in the Western world.
- 3.
Dazayuans are those old traditional homes in China built around a small garden. One character- istic of this type of residence is that people lived very close to one another and usually had to share common spaces. At the time of the field work, many of those dazayuans still existed, but there was a new policy: work units, instead of renting housing to their members, would try to sell apartments to the members. This was a step towards a market economy system.
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Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to Professor Weng Yongzhen, who invited me to initiate this research at Beijing Huilongguan Psychiatric Hospital while he was vice-director. Without his help and the close collaboration of Dr. Zou Yizhuang, this research project would have not taken place. The same must be said of Dr. Chuanyi Zhao, who was director when decisions were made, and of Dr. Zhang Peiyan who was director at the time of all the fieldwork. Dr. Chu an Ju-hsien always supported me in all aspects of this research. The fieldwork would not have been possible without the dedication of the research team headed by Dr. Yang Wenying and that included Xu Dong, Li Guo Wang, Su lin, Wang Haijun, and Wang Yanling. This research was sponsored by the Human Sciences Research Council of Canada .
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Sévigny, R. (2021). The Patient’s Personal Experience of Schizophrenia in China: A Clinical Sociology Approach to Mental Health. In: Fritz, J.M. (eds) International Clinical Sociology. Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54584-0_8
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