ABSTRACT
Mental health care is beset with definitional problems, of which retaining control of 'normality' is the greatest. Mental illness, primary care and society are locked together in a multiplicity of reciprocal relationships. Ethics is about doing the right thing, or living in the right way. Confucian ethics, from China, are part of a worldview that includes a concern and care for all living things, a reverence for others that is formalized into careful rules of conduct and an ethos of self-improvement to an ideal. The lack of a clear demarcation between madness and badness also goes some way to explaining psychiatry's peculiar susceptibility to political abuse. The discontent of the socioeconomically deprived will always have the capacity to drive social unrest. Some minds seem more than usually resistant to the apprehension of distress and disorder, and when distress becomes intolerable, it is somehow forced to find an outlet in bodily symptoms.
