Psychiatry has played a manifold role in the making of the modern world. The discipline offers care to patients who are often stigmatized; it also supplies ideas and values that shape understandings of the human mind and mental well-being. Yet the prolifration of diagnosable conditions and the infiltration of expert knowledge into culture and everyday life provoke suspicions about it being an agent of social control. This edited volume, with "modernity" and "governance" as the central themes, sets out to investigate contemporary phenomena that pertain to these issues in the context of Taiwan, a de facto country that has pioneered the development of psychiatry in Asia. The contributors come from backgrounds as diverse as STS, sociology, anthropology. public health, and forensic psychiatry. This disciplinary diversity is further enriched by the fact that several have clinical backgrounds. As the editors Yu-Yuch Tsai and Jia-Shin Chen proclaim in the introduction, this project is an attempt to instigate cooperation and dialogue between medicine and different humanities and social
science disciplines.
