# Commercialising everyday distress: neurasthenia and traditional Chinese medicine in colonial Hong Kong, 1950s to 1980s

## TL;DR

This paper explores how traditional Chinese medicine in Hong Kong commercialized neurasthenia, offering accessible care when Western psychiatry abandoned the term.

## Contribution

It highlights the role of traditional Chinese medicine in shaping public health perceptions during a medical transition in colonial Hong Kong.

## Key findings

- Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners rebranded as neurasthenia experts after Western psychiatry discarded the term.
- Commercialization of neurasthenia provided affordable and culturally familiar healthcare to the Chinese public.
- The case study reveals tensions between traditional medicine and Western psychiatry in Asia.

## Abstract

The persistent use of neurasthenia in Asia, an out-dated diagnostic category in modern psychiatry, has confounded many psychiatrists from the 1960s. This paper attempts to understand the prevalence of neurasthenia among the lay public in post-World War II Hong Kong. It examines the social history of psychiatry and focuses on the roles of traditional Chinese medicine in shaping public perceptions and responses towards neurasthenia. This research reveals that, when psychiatrists discarded the term as an ineffective label in the 1950s, practitioners and pharmaceutical companies of Chinese medicine seized on the chance to reinvent themselves as experts in neurasthenia. By commericialising everyday distress, they provided affordable, accessible and culturally familiar healing options to the Chinese public. A case study of neurasthenia, therefore, is not simply about changing disease categories but an important example to illustrate the tensions between traditional medicine and Western psychiatry in Asia.