BY DAVID N. RATNAVALE, M.D. At the invitation of the Chinese Ministry of Health, the

structure and organization of the Shanghai Psychiatric Institute, a therapeutic community in which the staff and patients work together in a classless social organization. which is part of a medical system that blends the modern and the ancient traditional medical practices. The author presents brief general information on acupuncture and describes its use in psychiatry, but stresses the preemi-nence of group activities in the therapy of mental illness. rience in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), where I had inves-tigated the difficulties inherent in any attempt to blend the ancient indigenous (ayurvedic) medical system with Western medicine. This paper presents a description of a hospital in Shanghai, one of the world’s largest cities, in the Kiangsu Province of the People’s Republic of China. I shall attempt to identify modern trends in psychiatr