Abstract
What do the following have in common: LCD-lit panels displaying suicide prevention messages on a bridge over the Han River (p. 4) and a 59-year-old man overcome with hwabyeong (fire illness) setting fire to the Sungnyemun gate in the centre of Seoul in 2008 (p. 1)? In Theodore Jun Yoo’s It’s Madness: The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea, both instances are indicative of how mental illness is understood in contemporary South Korean society. Seeking to understand how such ideas about mental health have developed, Yoo convincingly argues that the origins of current notions of mental illness and psychiatry can be traced to Korea’s history as a colony of Japan (1910–45).
Colonial Korea has been a popular topic for scholars in Korean Studies for many years. More recently, scholarship has started to take up novel and exciting ways of looking at the past by discussing seemingly mundane phenomena that paradoxically demonstrate the complexity of the time. Yoo’s historical inquiry into madness, mental illness and the psychiatric discourse in Korea fits neatly into this new approach.
To a historian of Korea new to the history of psychiatry, mental illness and psychiatry seem rather straightforward and universal concepts. Yoo, however, eloquently demonstrates that the psychiatric discourse in contemporary South Korea is, in fact, quite complicated. Drawing from a wide array of primary sources in different languages, including Korean literature and newspapers, official documents published by the Japanese colonial government, records of hospitals, and books written by Western missionaries, Yoo shows that the concept of mental illness is a complex manifestation of internal and external factors. It was neither a simple adaptation of the Japanese perception of mental illness, forced upon the Korean population, nor a copy of the modern Western psychiatric discourse introduced by missionaries-cum-doctors. Rather, it was a mixture of both traditional and modern influences that originated during Korea’s colonial period. A continuation of Korean and Chinese traditional medical practices, and indigenous shaman rituals and beliefs, influenced Japanese and Western notions of mental illness.
In four well-written and accessible chapters, Yoo traces and contextualizes the emergence of mental illness as a disorder that came to redefine, pathologize and criminalize behaviour previously seen as a manifestation of physical instability, spirit possession or the inability to express feelings of anger (hwa) and resentment (han). At the same time, he demonstrates how new influences could not completely erase the original beliefs, including, in particular, unexpressed feelings which are still regarded as a major cause of manifestations of madness (e.g. the arsonist of Sungnyemun gate). The first two chapters discuss how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mental illness emerged as a new nosological category that reconciled traditional and modern views. Western and Japanese approaches laid the groundwork for institutions and policing, and they branded mental illness as hereditary and genetic. The last two chapters divert from a ‘history from above’ to a discussion on the social and cultural responses to this new emerging notion of mental illness. Through an analysis of literature and print media, Yoo demonstrates how the Korean colonial community tried to grapple with the new understanding of mental illness by adopting the language of psychiatry (newspapers) to try to explain criminal behaviour and suicides. Literature, on the other hand, described madness in traditional ways, referring to it as a response to unexpressed emotional suffering, in this case resulting from the immense changes in the colonial era (p. 108). Each chapter has a clear focus, showing how the complexity of mental illness as a modern category mediated with the indigenous medical and shamanist discourses and clashed with the colonial reality that continues to influence the psychiatric discourse in South Korea in the twenty-first century.
The strength of the book lies in its wide variety of sources and its diverse perspectives that offer new insights in the construction of the concept of mental illness and its manifestation in colonial Korean society. It is an important original contribution to the history of psychiatry and also to Korean colonial history. Eloquently written, it avoids overly technical psychiatric or medical terms and offers explanations of foreign language terms for readers unfamiliar with Korean, Japanese or Chinese. Furthermore, it opens up new ways of looking at the history of psychiatry in a global context by including a non-Western and at the same time colonial perspective, thus avoiding a one-sided narrative. The relevance of Yoo’s book for historians of Korea lies in the inclusion of the history of psychiatry – an understudied field in Korean Studies. It therefore lays the groundwork for future research on the Korean history of psychiatry, while providing a fresh approach and a valuable addition to the history of colonial Korea. This is a well written, thoroughly researched and altogether engaging book that will appeal to specialists on both Korean history and the history of psychiatry.