UCLA

In this dissertation, I examine the development of psychiatry in the social and political context of South Korea. Although psychiatry was a product of the West that was introduced to Korea, the history of post-1945 Korea that I present reveals a multi-directional flow of ideas across regions. Drawing on extensive archival research, I explore the conditions of Korean psychiatry’s evolution and how psychiatrists used their professional platform to address the problems of a newly liberated nation—problems that included an authoritarian dictatorship and the social disruption that accompanied a drastic form of economic development and modernization. Previous historiography has tended to connect understandings of mental illness and mental health in Korea tightly to the indifference of the state and the therapeutic community. But the archives show psychiatrists competing for authority with various groups at the same time as they were developing their understanding of politics, illness, and normality, both within Korea and in a transnational context. Korean psychiatrists established themselves as therapeutic experts equipped to understand many aspects of Korean psychopathology and Korean manifestations of mental illness. I bring together the history of psychiatry, medicine, epidemiology, and international health, asking how Korean psychiatrists attended to the mental health of Koreans. This is one of the ways my dissertation integrates Korean history and the global history of psychiatry and demonstrates that Korean psychiatry was transnational in nature.