Shizhi and Wen Jie. Two Chinese Poets on Schizophrenia and Depression

Recently, proponents of the Critical Medical Humanities have recommended more genre-specific approaches to the analyses of illness narratives, looking at cultural specificities of idioms of distress rather than exclusively at trans-historical or transcultural approaches. This genre-specific critique grounds my reading of the work of Chinese poets Guo Lusheng (*1948) and Wen Jie (*1963), diagnosed with schizophrenia and clinical depression, respectively. The study uncovers a lyrical voice that takes shape in the poets’ illness-related contents, but also in the formal aspects of the Chinese poetic tradition. I argue that the therapeutic delight of writing poetry lies less in expressing subjective experiences than in finding poetic forms that integrate individual experiences into a collective form of illness poetics.