MENTAL ILLNESS BETWEEN SYSTEMS AND RELATIONS: DEPRESSION, BIPOLAR DISORDER, AND ANXIETY IN MODERN CHINA
Date of Award
8-22-2025
Date Published
September 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
Advisor(s)
Yingyi Ma
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology
Abstract
How do individuals in contemporary China experience and narrate mental illness, and what are the social origins of this mental distress? To answer these questions, this dissertation draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in three psychiatric hospitals, over 90 in-depth interviews with patients, families and psychiatrists, and more than 300 cases in clinics. It adopts a sociological approach to analyze these data to uncover how mental suffering emerges from the tensions between systems and relations in a rapidly transforming society. This dissertation develops the concept of the “colonization of the mental world” to theorize how mental life is increasingly colonized by the performance-driven structuring of emotion, the moral disciplining of intimate relationships, and the individualization of emotional responsibility. In primary and secondary schools, exam-centered discipline, quantification of student value, competitive and deprived peer relationships, and pathological family relationships are experienced by students as insecurity, self-blame and low self-esteem, anxiety and fear, and learning aversion. In universities, amid both the continuity and disjunction of the transition from secondary education, the continuous performance pressure exacerbated by the unequal distribution of cultural capital cultivates uncertainty about the future and heightened employment anxiety. The instrumentalization and rationalization of social relationships, coupled with pervasive social comparison and the dictates of the social clock, further exacerbates university students’ anxiety and alienation. In the workplace, neoliberal performance culture, Confucian hierarchical authority, and precarious labor regimes push workers into cycles of shame, continuous self-optimization, future anxiety, and burnout. Within families, the imbalance of emotional labor, emotional repression and gender discipline, and the moral anxiety in intergenerational responsibility convert intimate relationships into emotionally exhausting structures. These findings challenge the popular medicalized discourse of mental illness in social science by showing that mental suffering is rooted in the cumulative weight of systemic encroachment on mental life, like through academic pressures in education, moralized responsibility in families, and self-optimization demands in the workplace. By tracing how these systems, which include not only administrative and market-based logics in Habermas’ sense but also cultural and ethical modes of discipline, permeate the emotional fabric of everyday life, this dissertation reconceptualizes mental illness as a profoundly social and moral phenomenon, one that signals the erosion of subjectivity in modern society. Confronting this crisis requires not just clinical intervention or social welfare, but a sustained ethical and structural reconstruction of the mental world as a space of resonance, meaning, and relational vitality for contemporary Chinese people.
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Recommended Citation
Zhan, Ning, "MENTAL ILLNESS BETWEEN SYSTEMS AND RELATIONS: DEPRESSION, BIPOLAR DISORDER, AND ANXIETY IN MODERN CHINA" (2025). Dissertations - ALL. 2192.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2192
