Between Families and Institutions
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€25.99
2013 Mental Health Law China
A01=Zhiying Ma
Author_Zhiying Ma
biomedical health
biopolitical paternalism
biopolitics
care
Category=JHMC
China
community mental health
covert medication
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family
home confinement
involuntary hospitalization
kinship imaginaries
Mental health
parental care
paternalism
paternalistic citizenship
serious mental illness
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031741
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In contemporary China, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses have long been placed under the guardianship of close relatives who decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite attempts at reforms to ensure patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law reinforced the family’s rights and responsibilities. In Between Families and Institutions, Zhiying Ma examines how ideological, institutional, and technological processes shape families’ complicated involvement in psychiatric care. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, and family support groups as well as interviews with policymakers and activists, Ma maps the workings of what she calls “biopolitical paternalism”-a mode of governance that sees vulnerable individuals as sources of risk, frames risk management as the state’s paternalistic intervention, and shifts responsibilities for care and management onto families. Ma outlines the ethical tensions, intimate vulnerabilities in households, and health disparities across the population that biopolitical paternalism produces. By exploring these implications, Ma demonstrates the myriad ways biopower enables, inhibits, and transforms medical care in China.
Zhiying Ma is Assistant Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago.
