ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 analyses news reports that deal with crime and social wrongdoing where severe mental illness is at issue. This includes suicide, which is cast as ignominious and not honourable. Suicide can be honourable in Chinese culture. While suicide is not a crime across greater China, the Chinese-language newspapers regularly report on it as if it were. The reporting casts people with a severe mental illness as troublesome, often violent, outcasts, who should be removed from everyday society, in line with stigmatic Chinese cultural thinking. The chapter cites contemporary data on forensic psychiatric crime and suicide across greater China. This data shows that the level of the former does not vary much across greater China; while rates of suicide are notably higher in Taiwan and Hong Kong than they are on the mainland. This means that the differing frequencies of reporting on crime across the three newspaper may be discursively significant. Analysis of the crime and suicide reports shows how they sensationalise the experience of severe mental illness, but to varying degrees and for different apparent purposes. Issues of gender, agency, and state power come to the fore in this analysis.
