Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the new identities that are merging in China's mental health field, focusing on how they are shaped by the circulation of global activisms, the country's ongoing welfare reconstruction, and the strategic alliances built by/with various stakeholders.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, new identities have emerged for psychiatric "patients" in China, such as "users," "survivors, and "peers." This paper shows that these identities have emerged with the circulation of global activisms, the country's ongoing welfare reconstruction, and the strategic alliances built by/with various stakeholders. In particular, they are responses to the dominance of institutionalization in the country's mental healthcare for people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, as well as to the rise of community mental health in the country that is still very much expert-driven and biomedically oriented. These identities allow people to resist medical oppressions and to assert their voices in institutional and community mental health policies, but they might also trivialize and misrepresent people's lived experiences. Since anthropologists are often entangled in the production of these identities, we should be reflexive of the contexts that shape and are shaped by them, conscious of our own roles in the process, but also open to appreciating the slow, uneven, and unexpected changes that these new identities might bring.