A truly impressive achievement." - Sabine Frühstück, University of California, Santa Barbara ![]() Yumi Kim forcefully reclaims the prime role families and women played in shaping the impact of institutions on madness, no matter whether understood as an affliction by a fox spirit or a nervous illness, managed via domestic caging or psychiatric treatment. Nuanced and engagingly written, Madness in the Family is not just a powerful reassessment of medicine and kinship in modern Japan, but an empathetic reminder that everyday acts of compassion and care are pivotal for the functioning of the home, community, and state." - Emily Baum, University of California, Irvine Yumi Kim excavates a narrative that has so often been marginalized in the history of psychiatry: how families, and women in particular, remained central to defining madness and caring for the mentally ill. "Through a compelling array of sources and deft analysis, H. This perceptive study offers a fresh contribution to the history of medicine and the history of the family, as well as to the social history of Japan." - Jordan Sand, Georgetown University Her focus on the domestic sphere further reveals how both pathology and care were persistently gendered throughout the twentieth century. Attending to the voices of the patients themselves, Kim shows that families and village communities as much as institutions and experts defined and framed illness. "In a series of vivid examinations of the key sites of psychiatric intervention in Japan, Madness in the Family recasts our understanding of the modern medicalization of mental health. Illuminating how psychiatric uptake was challenged by the fraught terrain of devotion, love, and abuse in the intimate world of family-based care, Kim's analysis has great relevance for understanding what is happening today when care for the mentally distressed is shifting from institutions back to the community." - Junko Kitanaka, author of Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress "Kim's work uncovers the fascinating world of care for the mentally ill in modern Japan, when the advent of psychiatry was transforming the local cosmology of madness. As women and families navigated this shifting therapeutic landscape, they produced their own gendered approaches to madness that would take precedence over the claims of psychiatry, the law, and the state in everyday life.ĭecoupling the history of mental illness from the discipline and institutions of psychiatry, Madness in the Family reveals the power and fragilities of gender, kinship, and care in the creation of different modes of caring for and understanding mental illness that persist to this day. In cities, a booming medical marketplace spread ideas about feminized illnesses such as hysteria, and female defendants were evaluated for menstruation-induced disorders. In the countryside, psychiatrists tried to refute the notion that fox spirits could cause madness, and the government regulated the use of cage-like structures inside homes. Yumi Kim traces how women and families negotiated a dizzying array of claims about madness and its proper management across various settings. It centers on the experiences of women and families, which have long been obscured by the voices of male psychiatrists, state officials, and lawmakers. ![]() ![]() Madness in the Family examines how the family in Japan came to be seen as the natural provider of care for those suffering from mental illnesses. The family, especially women, thus continued to carry the burden of caring for those considered mad. Yet the state implemented no social welfare policies to make new medical services more accessible and affordable to the public. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized institutions rather than confinement at home, as had been common practice. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health. ![]() The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.
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