The Madness That Is Self: Contemporary Chinese Madness Narratives and the Critical Medical Humanities

Literary madness and representations of mental illness reflect the human psyche in pain, mirroring conflictedness, fragmentation, void, trauma, and definitions of normality and abnormality. Narratives of madness can be a means of self-revelation and self-knowledge, but since they are never isolated from their social contexts, they at the same time expose society’s repressive forces and limitations.

Initially, the Medical Humanities was an interdisciplinary field of study that integrated literature into the medical curriculum to gain insight into the subjective experience of illness. The Critical Medical Humanities constitutes the second wave of the Medical Humanities that has broadened its interdisciplinary reach into non-allied social sciences and arts. It considers itself “critical” because it recommends a more discerning and interdisciplinary view of what constitutes narrative, suggests approaches that highlight the historical and cultural specificity of idioms of distress, and aims to expand the western-centered canon of humanities research into other regions. This paper investigates madness narratives from the perspective of the Critical Medical Humanities and against the background of the development of the Medical Humanities in greater China, but specifically in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As a contribution to the Critical Medical Humanities, I will introduce Lee Chi Leung’s autopathography of bipolar disorder A Room Without Myself (2008) and The Grass is Bluer by the Sea (2018), and Lin Zhaosheng’s autopathography of self-mutilation Psychiatric Notes (2018). At the same time, I will highlight distinct developments of the Medical Humanities in their respective regions.