It's Madness: The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea - Hardcover

Yoo, Theodore Jun

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520289307 ISBN 13: 9780520289307

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

It's Madness examines Korea's years under Japanese colonialism, when mental health first became defined as a medical and social problem. As in most Asian countries, severe social ostracism, shame, and fear of jeopardizing marriage prospects compelled most Korean families to conceal the mentally ill behind closed doors. This book explores the impact of Chinese traditional medicine and its holistic approach to treating mental disorders, the resilience of folk illnesses as explanations for inappropriate and dangerous behaviors, the emergence of clinical psychiatry as a discipline, and the competing models of care under the Japanese colonial authorities and Western missionary doctors. Drawing upon unpublished archival as well as printed sources, this is the first study to examine the ways in which "madness" was understood, classified, and treated in traditional Korea and the role of science in pathologizing and redefining mental illness under Japanese colonial rule.

About this title

Review:

"[Breaks] new ground... [Yoo has] offered readers an ambitious challenge: one directed to Korean studies, but also one also carrying its implications far beyond."--Cross-Currents

About the Author:

Theodore Jun Yoo is Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University. He is the author of The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0520289307
• ISBN 13: 9780520289307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240