Kinship and Its Limits amid Serious Mental Illness Available to Purchase

This chapter examines how the risk and responsibility highlighted by psychiatry reveal and rework the power dynamics in contemporary Chinese family life. It shows that many people diagnosed with SMIs find themselves excluded or marginalized in love and marriage, which are now based on self-interests and market calculations. Meanwhile, their ties with parents largely remain, although those ties also become fragile and unsupported. Moreover, family members who lose hope or see themselves as too vulnerable for caregiving may choose to have patients hospitalized indefinitely. The chapter also describes a gendered pattern in family life: while fathers and other male family members tend to be more attached to the biomedical normalization of patients, mothers and other female family members are more willing to recognize patients’ vulnerability and to engage with their alternative experiences. These gendered interactions illustrate the power and limits of psychiatry, including its construction of a paternalistic family.