Disabling Crisis: Mental Health Experiences of Visually and Hearing-Impaired People in Shanghai
Main Article Content
Keywords
sensory disability, mental health, crisis
Abstract
This paper stems from over a year of fieldwork in Shanghai with visual and hearing disability communities. It questions to whom mental health is a crisis. Attention to the experience of people with disabilities would contribute to rethinking the conceptualization of crisis and its material implications.
References
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Biehl, J. (2005). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. University of California Press.
Biehl, J., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (2007). Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. University of California Press.
Burch, S., & Kafer, A. (Eds.). (2010). Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Gallaudet University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ecnu/detail.action?docID=4860676
Butler, J. (2022). A livable life? An inhabitable world? Scheler on the tragic. Puncta, 5(2), 8–27.
Cunningham-Burley, S., & Backett-Milburn, K. (2001). Exploring the Body: Finding a Space for both the Carnal and the Political. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501966
Dauncey, S. (2020). Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity, and Culture. Cambridge University Press.
de la Cadena, M. (2021). Not knowing: In the presence of... In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Duke University Press.
DelVecchio Good, M.-J., Hyde, S. T., Pinto, S., & Good, B. J. (Eds.). (2008). Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press.
Deshen, S. A. (1992). Blind People: The Private and Public Life of Sightless Israelis. State University of New York Press.
Desjarlais, R. (1994). Struggling along: The possibilities for experience among the homeless mentally ill. American Anthropologist, 96(4), 886–901.
Desjarlais, R. (1997). Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Desjarlais, R. (2003). Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists. University of California Press.
Desjarlais, R., & Throop, C. J. (2011). Phenomenological approaches in anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40(1), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092010-153345
Dyring, R., & Wentzer, T. S. (2021). How life makes a conversation of us: Ontology, ethics, and responsive anthropology. In Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (pp. 50–72). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823294299-003
Friedman, S. L. (2004). Embodying civility: Civilizing processes and symbolic citizenship in southeastern. The Journal of Asian Studies, 63(3), 687–718.
Friedner, M. (2015). Valuing deaf worlds in urban India. Rutgers University Press.
Friedner, M. (2018). Beyond the social. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360108
Friedner, M., & Kusters, A. (2020). Deaf anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 49(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-034545
Friedner, M., & Zoanni, T. (2018, December 17). Disability from the south: Toward a lexicon. Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2018/disability-from-the-south-toward-a-lexicon.html/
Giordano, C. (2020). Exceeding crisis. The psychic life of drawings. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12547
Goodley, D. (2009). Bringing the psyche back into disability studies: The case of the body with/out organs. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 3(3), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0021
Hammer, G. (2015). Ethnographies of blindness: The method of sensory knowledge: Methods for rethinking an ableist world. In Disability and Qualitative Inquiry. Routledge.
Hammer, G. (2019). Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body. University of Michigan Press.
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203466025
Izutsu, T., Tsutsumi, A., Minas, H., Thornicroft, G., Patel, V., & Ito, A. (2015). Mental health and well-being in the sustainable development goals. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2, 1052–1054. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00457-5
Jackson, M. (Ed.). (1996). Things as they are: New directions in phenomenological anthropology. Indiana University Press.
Jackson, M. (2011). Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want. Duke University Press.
Jackson, M. (2013). Lifeworlds: Essays in existential anthropology. The University of Chicago Press.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.
Kleinman, A. (2012). Medical anthropology and mental health: Five questions for the next fifty years. In Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms, and Futures (pp. 178–196). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395478
Kohrman, M. (2005). Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China. University of California Press.
Mackenzie, J., & Kesner, C. (2016). Mental health funding and the SDGs: What now and who pays? Overseas Development Institute. http://www.sdgfund.org/mental-health-funding-and-sdgs-what-now-and-who-pays
Marrato, S. (2020). Intercorporeality. In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press.
Mattingly, C. (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, C. (2013). Moral selves and moral scenes: Narrative experiments in everyday life. Ethnos, 78(3), 301–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.691523
Mattingly, C. (2019a). Critical phenomenology and mental health: Moral experience under extraordinary conditions. Ethos, 47(1), 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12230
Mattingly, C. (2019b). Defrosting concepts, destabilizing doxa: Critical phenomenology and the perplexing particular. Anthropological Theory, 19(4), 415–439. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619828568
Mattingly, C. (2022). Crisis, alterity, and tradition: An anthropological contribution to critical phenomenology. Puncta, 5(2), 45–66.
Mattingly, C., & Throop, C. J. (2018). The anthropology of ethics and morality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1), 475–492. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050129
McKearney, P. (2021). The limits of knowing other minds: Intellectual disability and the challenge of opacity. Social Analysis, 65(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650101
Merali, Z., & Anisman, H. (2016). Deconstructing the mental health crisis: 5 uneasy pieces. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 41(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1503/jpn.160101
Mills, C. (2018). From ‘invisible problem’ to global priority: The inclusion of mental health in the sustainable development goals. Development and Change, 49(3), 843–866. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12397
Nakamura, K. (2013a). A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan. Cornell University Press.
Nakamura, K. (2013b). Making sense of sensory ethnography: The sensual and the multisensory. American Anthropologist, 115(1), 132–135.
Paterson, K. (2001). Disability studies and phenomenology: Finding a space for both the carnal and the political. In Exploring the Body. Palgrave Macmillan. http://link.springer.com/10.1057/9780230501966
Paterson, K., & Hughes, B. (1999). Disability studies and phenomenology: The carnal politics of everyday life. Disability & Society, 14(5), 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599925966
Pink, S. (Director). (2015, March 27). What is Sensory Ethnography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON7hfORQUio&ab_channel=NCRMUK
Que, J., Lu, L., & Shi, L. (2019). Development and challenges of mental health in China. General Psychiatry, 32(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1136/gpsych-2019-100053
Ram, K., & Houston, C. (Eds.). (2015). Phenomenology in anthropology: A sense of perspective. Indiana University Press.
Ryan, G., Qureshi, O., Salaria, N., & Eaton, J. (2018). Mental health and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda: Global inaction on mental health is putting the brakes on development. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. https://globalmentalhealthcommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/UNGA_policy-brief_MHIN1.pdf.pdf
Savransky, M. (2016). The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5
Shakespeare, T. (2008). Disability: Suffering, social oppression, or complex predicament? In The Contingent Nature of Life: Bioethics and Limits of Human Existence (Vol. 39). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6764-8
Shakespeare, T. (2014). Disability rights and wrongs revisited (Second edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Strathern, M. (2001). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia (3. paperback print). Univ. of California Press.
Throop, C. J. (2012). On the Varieties of Empathic Experience: Tactility, Mental Opacity, and Pain in Yap. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 26(3), 408–430. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2012.01225.x
Vigo, D., Thornicroft, G., & Atun, R. (2016). Estimating the true global burden of mental illness. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(2), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00505-2
Votruba, N., Thornicroft, G., & FundaMentalSDG Steering Group. (2016). Sustainable development goals and mental health: Learnings from the contribution of the FundaMentalSDG global initiative. Global Mental Health, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/gmh.2016.20
Weiss, G. (2008). Refiguring the ordinary. Indiana University Press.
Yang, J. (2018). Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance. Polity Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321715166_Mental_Health_in_China_Change_Tradition_and_Therapeutic_Governance
Zigon, J., & Throop, C. J. (2014). Moral Experience: Introduction. Ethos, 42(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12035
Zigon, J., & Throop, C. J. (2022). Introduction to the special issue. Puncta, 5(2), 1–7.
Biehl, J. (2005). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. University of California Press.
Biehl, J., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (2007). Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. University of California Press.
Burch, S., & Kafer, A. (Eds.). (2010). Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Gallaudet University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ecnu/detail.action?docID=4860676
Butler, J. (2022). A livable life? An inhabitable world? Scheler on the tragic. Puncta, 5(2), 8–27.
Cunningham-Burley, S., & Backett-Milburn, K. (2001). Exploring the Body: Finding a Space for both the Carnal and the Political. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501966
Dauncey, S. (2020). Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity, and Culture. Cambridge University Press.
de la Cadena, M. (2021). Not knowing: In the presence of... In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Duke University Press.
DelVecchio Good, M.-J., Hyde, S. T., Pinto, S., & Good, B. J. (Eds.). (2008). Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press.
Deshen, S. A. (1992). Blind People: The Private and Public Life of Sightless Israelis. State University of New York Press.
Desjarlais, R. (1994). Struggling along: The possibilities for experience among the homeless mentally ill. American Anthropologist, 96(4), 886–901.
Desjarlais, R. (1997). Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Desjarlais, R. (2003). Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists. University of California Press.
Desjarlais, R., & Throop, C. J. (2011). Phenomenological approaches in anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40(1), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092010-153345
Dyring, R., & Wentzer, T. S. (2021). How life makes a conversation of us: Ontology, ethics, and responsive anthropology. In Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (pp. 50–72). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823294299-003
Friedman, S. L. (2004). Embodying civility: Civilizing processes and symbolic citizenship in southeastern. The Journal of Asian Studies, 63(3), 687–718.
Friedner, M. (2015). Valuing deaf worlds in urban India. Rutgers University Press.
Friedner, M. (2018). Beyond the social. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360108
Friedner, M., & Kusters, A. (2020). Deaf anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 49(1), 31–47. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220-034545
Friedner, M., & Zoanni, T. (2018, December 17). Disability from the south: Toward a lexicon. Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2018/disability-from-the-south-toward-a-lexicon.html/
Giordano, C. (2020). Exceeding crisis. The psychic life of drawings. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12547
Goodley, D. (2009). Bringing the psyche back into disability studies: The case of the body with/out organs. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 3(3), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0021
Hammer, G. (2015). Ethnographies of blindness: The method of sensory knowledge: Methods for rethinking an ableist world. In Disability and Qualitative Inquiry. Routledge.
Hammer, G. (2019). Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body. University of Michigan Press.
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203466025
Izutsu, T., Tsutsumi, A., Minas, H., Thornicroft, G., Patel, V., & Ito, A. (2015). Mental health and well-being in the sustainable development goals. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2, 1052–1054. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00457-5
Jackson, M. (Ed.). (1996). Things as they are: New directions in phenomenological anthropology. Indiana University Press.
Jackson, M. (2011). Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want. Duke University Press.
Jackson, M. (2013). Lifeworlds: Essays in existential anthropology. The University of Chicago Press.
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.
Kleinman, A. (2012). Medical anthropology and mental health: Five questions for the next fifty years. In Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: Histories, Activisms, and Futures (pp. 178–196). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822395478
Kohrman, M. (2005). Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China. University of California Press.
Mackenzie, J., & Kesner, C. (2016). Mental health funding and the SDGs: What now and who pays? Overseas Development Institute. http://www.sdgfund.org/mental-health-funding-and-sdgs-what-now-and-who-pays
Marrato, S. (2020). Intercorporeality. In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press.
Mattingly, C. (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, C. (2013). Moral selves and moral scenes: Narrative experiments in everyday life. Ethnos, 78(3), 301–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.691523
Mattingly, C. (2019a). Critical phenomenology and mental health: Moral experience under extraordinary conditions. Ethos, 47(1), 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12230
Mattingly, C. (2019b). Defrosting concepts, destabilizing doxa: Critical phenomenology and the perplexing particular. Anthropological Theory, 19(4), 415–439. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499619828568
Mattingly, C. (2022). Crisis, alterity, and tradition: An anthropological contribution to critical phenomenology. Puncta, 5(2), 45–66.
Mattingly, C., & Throop, C. J. (2018). The anthropology of ethics and morality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1), 475–492. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050129
McKearney, P. (2021). The limits of knowing other minds: Intellectual disability and the challenge of opacity. Social Analysis, 65(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650101
Merali, Z., & Anisman, H. (2016). Deconstructing the mental health crisis: 5 uneasy pieces. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 41(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1503/jpn.160101
Mills, C. (2018). From ‘invisible problem’ to global priority: The inclusion of mental health in the sustainable development goals. Development and Change, 49(3), 843–866. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12397
Nakamura, K. (2013a). A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan. Cornell University Press.
Nakamura, K. (2013b). Making sense of sensory ethnography: The sensual and the multisensory. American Anthropologist, 115(1), 132–135.
Paterson, K. (2001). Disability studies and phenomenology: Finding a space for both the carnal and the political. In Exploring the Body. Palgrave Macmillan. http://link.springer.com/10.1057/9780230501966
Paterson, K., & Hughes, B. (1999). Disability studies and phenomenology: The carnal politics of everyday life. Disability & Society, 14(5), 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599925966
Pink, S. (Director). (2015, March 27). What is Sensory Ethnography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON7hfORQUio&ab_channel=NCRMUK
Que, J., Lu, L., & Shi, L. (2019). Development and challenges of mental health in China. General Psychiatry, 32(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1136/gpsych-2019-100053
Ram, K., & Houston, C. (Eds.). (2015). Phenomenology in anthropology: A sense of perspective. Indiana University Press.
Ryan, G., Qureshi, O., Salaria, N., & Eaton, J. (2018). Mental health and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda: Global inaction on mental health is putting the brakes on development. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. https://globalmentalhealthcommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/UNGA_policy-brief_MHIN1.pdf.pdf
Savransky, M. (2016). The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5
Shakespeare, T. (2008). Disability: Suffering, social oppression, or complex predicament? In The Contingent Nature of Life: Bioethics and Limits of Human Existence (Vol. 39). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6764-8
Shakespeare, T. (2014). Disability rights and wrongs revisited (Second edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Strathern, M. (2001). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia (3. paperback print). Univ. of California Press.
Throop, C. J. (2012). On the Varieties of Empathic Experience: Tactility, Mental Opacity, and Pain in Yap. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 26(3), 408–430. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2012.01225.x
Vigo, D., Thornicroft, G., & Atun, R. (2016). Estimating the true global burden of mental illness. The Lancet Psychiatry, 3(2), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00505-2
Votruba, N., Thornicroft, G., & FundaMentalSDG Steering Group. (2016). Sustainable development goals and mental health: Learnings from the contribution of the FundaMentalSDG global initiative. Global Mental Health, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/gmh.2016.20
Weiss, G. (2008). Refiguring the ordinary. Indiana University Press.
Yang, J. (2018). Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance. Polity Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321715166_Mental_Health_in_China_Change_Tradition_and_Therapeutic_Governance
Zigon, J., & Throop, C. J. (2014). Moral Experience: Introduction. Ethos, 42(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12035
Zigon, J., & Throop, C. J. (2022). Introduction to the special issue. Puncta, 5(2), 1–7.
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Jan 20, 2024
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Author Biography
Juan Miguel Ortega-Quesada, East China Normal University
Dr. Juan Miguel Ortega-Quesada is a senior project manager at the UN program for migrations. He holds a PhD in anthropology from East China Normal University in Shanghai. His research interests include medical anthropology quests for understanding disability, health, illness, and care. He also works to enhance spaces where academic and applied pieces of knowledge converge to produce transformation.