The Patient’s Personal Experience of Schizophrenia in China: A Clinical Sociology Approach to Mental Health

Abstract

This chapter builds on one that was published in 2008. The chapter explores the patient’s personal experience (or experiencing, to use a more technical term) of schizophrenia in the context of a changing Chinese society in the 1990s, and presents a few important aspects of clinical sociology. The primary aim of this action-research project was to experiment with clinical sociology as an approach that can be applied to the experience of severe mental illness with all its complexity: the personal, interpersonal, organizational, social, political, and cultural dimensions. The second objective was to offer a perspective that would take into account the context of modern urban China. Some basic concepts are thus explored such as person and experience; society; and social rehabilitation. The methodology was based on interviews with 20 patients and related people (family, professionals, work leaders) using a heuristic conceptual grid for the capture of the essentials of the involved social practices. Four cases of patients are then presented to illustrate the whole process. Some results from our analysis support the main thesis: clinical sociology could be an alternative tool for rehabilitation intervention in the field of psychiatry research and treatment.