Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

lt;p>Milton Lewis is an historian of medicine, public health and health policy; and is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, the Charles Perkins Centre, the University of Sydney. As the book titles below show he has written on a very wide range of aspects of medicine and public health; across the lifecycle from infants to the dying and across a variety of medical specialties and health problems. He has a long term interest in the contribution history can make to understanding better health problems and health policy; and, more broadly, in how to apply what used to be called, especially in 19th century Germany, the "human sciences" (history, anthropology, economics, politics, sociology and psychology) together with human biology, in an integrated way, to advance understanding of human affairs; a very much more difficult task but one essential to dealing with the growing complexity of a world where globalisation and the forces of economic "modernisation" interact with ancient cultures and "pre-modern" societies. He has published 15 books (as well as book chapters, special issues of journals and journal articles). The three most recent books, including this book, Mental Health in Asia and the Pacific: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, reflect his concern with the impact of globalisation on the health of the peoples of the diverse polities, economies, societies and cultures of Asia and the Pacific; a region many see as the emerging centre of world affairs. The first two books - MJ Lewis and KL MacPherson, eds, Public Health in Asia and the Pacific: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (2008; 2011) and MJ Lewis and KL MacPherson, eds, Health Transitions and the Double Disease Burden in Asia and the Pacific: Histories of 4 Responses to Noncommunicable and Communicable Diseases (2013) - cover communicable and noncommunicable diseases. This third book, in dealing with mental disorders, completes the coverage of the "total disease burden" of countries of the region.

Harry Minas is Head of the Global and Cultural Mental Health Unit, Centre for Mental Health, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, and Director of the Melbourne Refugee Studies Program, both at The University of Melbourne. He is a psychiatrist who has worked in transcultural and global mental health over the past three decades. His mental health research, education and service development work has been in development of mental health services for multicultural communities in Australia and mental health system development in low-income and middle-income countries, and post-conflict and post-disaster settings in South-East Europe, Asia and the Pacific. He has had a particular focus on mental health and human rights, working with academic and government colleagues in several countries on improving human rights protections for persons with mental illness and psychosocial disabilities. At the University of Melbourne he has developed graduate diploma and master-level programs in transcultural psychiatry and global mental health and, through the International Mental Health Leadership Program, has trained several hundred mental health leaders in more than 20 countries in Asia and the Pacific. He has written on transcultural psychiatry and global mental health, including more than 250 peer-reviewed journal papers, books, book chapters, reports and multimedia teaching products.

A brief political, social, cultural and economic history of China.- Psychiatry in Republican China.- Psychiatric Services in Early 20th Century China.- Psychiatry in Hong Kong during the Britishperiod and post-handover.- Mental health and psychiatry during the Mao era, 1949-1976.- Mental health and psychiatry during the reform era, c1977-2012.- The Positives and Negatives of the Era from c1980 to the Implementation of the 2013 Mental Health Law.- Mental Health Law and Policy, Human Rights and Sustainable Development.- TCM treatments and Chinese conceptions of the body-mind relationship; how they differ from Western conceptions and those of biomedicine that incorporates those conceptions.- On the speed of cultural, social and economic change and the rise of the "therapeutic" response in contemporary China".- The contribution of the global mental health movement and overseas psychiatrists to the recent effort to advance mental health and improve the mental health system.- From the Kerr Asylum to the Guanzhou Brain Hospital.- Historical overview of the establishment of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.- Mental health of the Chinese in Indonesia.- Mental health of the Chinese in Malaysia.- Mental health of the Chinese in the Philippines.- Mental health of the Chinese in Australia.- Mental health of Chinese International Students.