Biopolitical Paternalism and its Maternal Supplements in Community Mental Health Available to Purchase

This chapter examines how family life is shaped and utilized by the new national community mental health program. The program connects patients’ risk of illness aggravation to their risk of committing violent behavior, and it reconfigures guan as the state’s paternalistic management of both. Meanwhile, it requires family members to carry out the biopolitical project of guan, assuming they can easily summon patients’ compliance. Fieldwork shows that, in reality, caregivers may resort to practices publicly denounced by the program, such as covert administration of medications and home confinement, and that community mental health workers often acquiesce to them. Family members—especially women—undertake these practices not just as expedient measures of risk management, which the program requires but fails to provide resources for, but also as compassionate engagement with patients. These family practices thus exist as maternal supplements to the state’s community mental health interventions and their biopolitical paternalism.