This paper examines the biomedical construction of 'travelling psychosis' (TP), a contested psychiatric diagnosis pertaining to a severe mental disturbance that occurs among migrant workers who travel long distance in China's overcrowded trains. Although TP can produce substantial psychiatric morbidity, it is also a socially constructed entity that serves social uses. By subscribing to a ritualistic model of validation and by invoking the rhetoric of scientific authority, Chinese psychiatrists who created TP have been able to accomplish such goals as legitimating its forensic function, securing research funds, enhancing their academic status and raising railway authorities consciousness about passengers' safety issues. But the 'biopsychosocial' paradigm they espouse supplies only a parochial form of social analysis and a spurious sense of comprehensiveness. By privileging proximate risk factors, it fails to address the wider environment of the post-reform political economy that ultimately governs population movement and put migrant workers at risk of health problems. This paper submits that a critical examination of this sanitised biopsychosocial paradigm will enliven biomedical research as well as augment its impact on policy development in China.

Migration Construction travel biopsychosocial Psychosis

China disease classification Models, Psychological post-communism mental health human middle aged railway psychosis travel Railroads Aged morbidity rural health mental disease science income migrant worker Humans Adolescent male female Socioeconomic Factors Psychotic Disorders safety risk factor railway transport Reproducibility of Results Article adult politics research Case-Control Studies Sociology, Medical Transients and Migrants medical geography Crowding forensic psychiatry