Cultural Psychiatry and the Implementation of Transcultural Psychotherapy in China

Abstract

Cultural psychiatry deals with cultural aspects of human behaviour, mental health, psychopathology, and treatment. Psychological services in Chinese society require significant emphasis on the cultural sensitivity and competence of practitioners, regarding both the specific cultural background of mainstream Chinese culture and the diversity of people of other cultures living in China. Much needs to be explored about the implementation and adaption of transcultural psychotherapy in developing countries such as China and how this may influence the development of cultural psychiatry in a rapidly changing world.

In this chapter, we present a brief introduction of the cultural matrix of the psyche as seen in Chinese culture, and give an overview of the development of psychological services in Chinese society over the last 30 years based on multi-factor analysis of peer-reviewed articles, classical textbooks, personal oral history, interviews, and clinical experiences, before discussing potential implications for culturally adaptive psychotherapy. We report that the modern Chinese cultural matrix of the psyche is a comprehensive combination of five dominant philosophies, namely Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Communism, and Socialist Market Economics. The contemporary mainstream healing model within psychotherapy for Chinese patients includes four schools, these being psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioural, humanistic, and systemic models. In contrast, Traditional Chinese Medicine as well as local religions, superstition, and folk healing practices used to be the most common methods for ordinary Chinese people to deal with psychological suffering.

We discuss that contemporary Chinese people are craving for modern psychotherapy, while factors including complex psycho-social dynamics, a lack of availability, and a lack of professionalism, and therefore effectiveness mean that people’s expectations remain unfulfilled in many cases.

We conclude that the Chinese cultural matrix of psyche is profoundly sophisticated as a background music for modern Chinese and that each individual in psychotherapy presents his or her unique belief system and psychological needs within his/her own subcultural matrix. Contrasting traditional healing practices and modern trends in psychotherapy in China point towards the need for a new system of mental health services with more humane paradigm and techniques.