Madness without Diagnosis: Recognizing the Mad in Colonial Taiwan's Newspapers, 1895–1945
精神醫療史的研究往往從醫師、醫院或疾病出發，但對於那些未曾進入醫療體系的瘋狂者，我們似乎所知不多。他們在世時，不但醫院的病歷與官方統計照見不到這些人，在生活中也多半缺乏發言權，個人經驗鮮有機會被記錄，更遑論留下自述的文字。本報告將藉由新聞報導，追索日治臺灣瘋狂者的社會形象與生命處境。
報告首先會釐清，在日治臺灣的脈絡下，報紙中對「瘋狂者」最常見的稱呼方式。接著則是以《臺灣日日新報》為例，對瘋狂者的行動加以分類、統計，指出他們見諸報端的原因多半與犯罪無關，而是因為行為被視為擾亂秩序，或僅因其失蹤、遊蕩於市街，乃至於死亡等事件。此外更進一步指出，報導往往依據可見的行為舉止來判斷「狂」或「精神病」，而判定者多半為警察、記者、鄰人或家屬，醫者的診斷則幾近缺席。最後，本報告分析這些行動如何形塑大眾對於瘋狂者的認知、對其「病因」的想像，以及「狂女」所帶出的性別議題。
Histories of psychiatry have tended to begin with physicians, institutions, or diseases. About the mad and those called mentally ill who never entered the medical system, however, we seem to know very little. In their own lifetimes they appeared neither in hospital case records nor in official statistics; they were marginal individuals with their voices unheard and their experiences rarely recorded, still less set down in their own words. Drawing chiefly on newspaper reports, this presentation traces the social image and the lived circumstances of the mad in colonial Taiwan.
The presentation will first discuss the ways, in the context of colonial Taiwan, these people were most often referred to. It then surveys and classifies the actions attributed to them in the Taiwan nichinichi shinpō. The main reason that they appeared in print was not so much for having committed crimes as for simply being regarded as disturbing public order, or for having gone missing, wandered the streets, or died. The assertion that they were "mad" rested on what could be witnessed outwardly, and people who made such a judgment were mostly policemen, reporters, neighbors, and family members; an actual psychiatric diagnosis was almost always absent. The presentation will thus further consider how these actions shaped popular understandings of madness and of its supposed causes, as well as the questions of gender raised by the figure of the "madwoman" (kyōjo, 狂女).
