Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person By Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, et al. University of California Press. 2011. £18.95 (pb). 289 pp. ISBN: 9780520269453

I was born in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan in 1973. At 04:00 h on 28 July 1976, when I was 2 years old, my home city suffered one of the most destructive earthquakes of the 20th century. My father tucked my sister and me under each arm and ran into the sitting room of our apartment, only for the floor to collapse beneath him, sending us all tumbling down two stories. By some miracle we all survived: a quarter of a million people perished.

Meanwhile, another earthquake was about to strike. A few months earlier, China's premier Zhou Enlai had died and the following September saw the death of Mao Zedong. The subsequent chain of political events saw the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping, the man credited as the architect of the socialist market economy and the economic and social earthquake of China's rise to world economic powerhouse.

These days it seems China is never out of the news. Like the death toll in the Tangshan earthquake, the statistics about modern China – of population movements and economic growth – seem always to be staggering. But as with the Tangshan earthquake, behind the numbers are the particular stories of individual lives that have changed. Deep China seeks to explore through the lenses of psychiatry and sociology the effects on the individual, and on the millions of individuals that make up China, of the seismic social changes we have lived through – the shift from a centrally controlled economy to a free market, from collective values to individualism and individual aspirations for personal happiness.

So why should this be of interest to readers? Personally, I found it fascinating to see the insights of psychiatry brought to light in this way – to see how psychodynamic models can help us to understand the way individuals and nations come to terms with or sometimes fail to come to terms with repeated trauma, terrible suffering and huge change. As a doctor trained in China and working as a psychiatrist in the west of England, it was good to be reminded of the cultural contingency of psychiatric diagnoses such as depression, and I was dismayed by the vivid stories of the continuing stigma of mental illness in China and by the commercialisation of mental distress through the encroachment of Big Pharma.

Deep China both saddened me and made me optimistic for the future. As a psychiatrist I am fascinated by the stories of individual people. The stories of China over the past 100 years are amazing, but even more amazing are the stories of the individuals that have lived it.