Madness in the Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Family: Writing Away from Psychiatry

Presented by Dr. Yumi Kim

September 23rd, 2022, 4PM at Sherbrooke 680-Room 1041 McGill University

Although it is assumed that European-trained Japanese psychiatrists assumed control of the management of the mentally ill at the turn of the twentieth century, most afflicted individuals remained in their families' care and custody. This talk explores both the history of how family-based care intensified in Japan despite the introduction of psychiatry as well as the challenges of writing such a history. It shows how most histories based on the psychiatric archive have rendered invisible a crucial condition that enabled family-based care in the first place: a domestic and moral economy of caregiving dependent upon women's labor. By tracing how this project has shifted in focus from psychiatry to women's domestic caregiving, Kim aims to spark a conversation about the benefits of articulating the intellectual, social, and affective processes through which historians grapple with archival materials and write histories.