Illness in Context: Cultural and Historical Understandings

This paper examines a gendered reconfiguration in the Japanese empire’s approach to sexually transmitted disease (STD) control during the Asia-Pacific War (1937–1945), tracing how medical surveillance expanded from targeting women to also encompass imperial soldiers as potential vectors of infection. This shift unsettled the gendered logic of what has been described as a “misogynistic empire,” in which women’s bodies were systematically exploited, by recasting male bodies not only as assets to be protected but as risks requiring regulation. Drawing on case studies from Japan-occupied Manchukuo in northeast China and the “comfort women” sexual slavery system, the paper shows how colonial medicine, bacteriological science, eugenic thinking, and military hygiene converged to produce a regime of health governance that operated across both female and male bodies. By tracing how militarised health practices established and maintained hygienic boundaries between colony and metropole, the paper highlights how concerns over infection, reproduction, and imperial stability were embedded in the everyday management of bodies. In doing so, it positions wartime Japanese medicine within a broader critical medical humanities framework that foregrounds the entanglement of science, power, and governance.

This research identifies the scholarly collection of first-person mental illness narratives have been collected and analysed by medical professionals from 1947 to 1997 in the UK and US. The earliest identified collection, 'The Plea for the Silent' (1957) by Donald Johnson and Norman Dodds, was written by two members of Parliament - the former of whom was also a general practitioner, the first politician to raise appointment of the Ombudsman, and a previously certified mental patient. The text presents a handful of letters submitted by previously certified patients, which called for legal reform of the certification process and treatment conditions. Highlighting the underlying conflict between psychiatrists and patients in post-war Britain, 'The Plea for the Silent' pinpoints a crossroads in anglophone psychiatry; setting the scene for the patient voice to be propelled with activist and civil rights movements across the latter half of the century. As the number of collections published by medical professionals steadily increased over the late 20th century, the researchers consistently described a ‘unique insight’ held only by the patient. Towards the millennium, the study of first-person narratives evolved into the field of Narrative Medicine and was further specialised by the medical humanities and ‘experts by experience’. Overall, this research traces the inclusion of patient experience in psychiatry, and how this became a fundamental platform of knowledge exchange.

My dissertation-project is a critical analysis of how client movements voices were given a platform within the broader political context of health-policy changes in Sweden during 1970-1992. I´m interested in how discourses of vulnerability were mediated through a problem-space preceding the 1990s Psychiatric Reform, and how patient- and client organizations (R-förbund) were framed in the magazine Pockettidningen R. My presentation will focus on how R mediated peoples experience of institutional care, in a time and place that was already in the mood for a narrative turn to a more person centered care.

R brought together movements that wanted to influence welfare policy and was influential in the debate of the psychiatric health-care sector during the 1970s-80s. The magazine included both the experiences of clients and health-care professionals, and they were all presented and politicized through a power-critical perspective, that were influenced by a broader critique of psychiatry, often framed through a critique of the history of psychiatry. Through activist journalism, the magazine wanted to give voice to experiences of welfare institutions such as psychiatry, social services and correctional services. According to the founder of Pockettidningen R, Hans Nestius, the story of oneself and one's experience was a “truth of experience” that offered new ways of contesting psychiatry as science and proven experience. In the magazine R, this was performed through a new narrative of the patient, where the patient was presented as a subject of care.

Contemporary South Korea has high numbers of depression that has led to discussions on Korea as a “depressed nation.” It is, however, relatively recent that depression became to be defined in biomedical terms in Korea. Historically speaking, it is from the 1980s that people start thinking they have depression, rather than merely feeling depressed, and are more likely to become potential psychiatric patients. Although the Korean translation of depression (wu-wul-jeung in Korean) is related to the concept of disease, the depression talk in the 1980s to 1990s is not simply about health problems, but also about the symptoms of larger social ills. However, in the wake of psycho-medical industries, medical and consumer views of mental health have been on the rise while the social nature of depression has increasingly been silenced.

This study explores the issue of navigable boundaries of depression, which could be interpreted as a “cultural phenomenon” or “symptoms of disease.” The paper is thus devoted to the following question of how knowledge of depression was produced and consumed with the greater emotional resonance of collective consciousness of health/disease on the one hand, and what narratives were employed in the context of “depressed nation” discussions and in consequence how depression identified as a form of social pathology, paradoxically, transformed into “the personal” emotional experience, on the other.