I was strongly struck by a passage I encountered in an old document describing "coercive water-based treatment (kan-sui therapy)", which stated that “mental illness is caused by the head boiling, and therefore the head should be cooled with water.” Using these words as a point of departure, I engage in a staged situation in which I discuss the idea of sanity with a friend who lives with a mental illness.

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In the video, our bodies lie horizontally, with only our two heads protruding into the frame. From outside the image, hands extend holding a watering can, pouring water over us as if tending to plants. These hands belong to an unseen presence that probes whether we are normal or not. Within this absurd theatrical dialogue, in which normality and abnormality are repeatedly questioned, we continue to ask and confirm, “Are you sane?” and “I am sane.”

 

Supplement:
* The coercive water-based treatment referred to in this work is fundamentally different from hydrotherapy as used in physical therapy or rehabilitation.
Hydrotherapy has existed from antiquity to the present primarily in the form of therapeutic bathing, hot springs, and physical therapy. In psychiatry, water-based procedures were employed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but these practices were often driven more by mechanisms of patient control than by therapeutic theory, and are now largely discredited.

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In Japan, with the introduction of modern psychiatry from the Meiji period onward, ritual water bathing practices rooted in folk religion became intertwined with hospital management systems, and were used as a means of controlling patients deemed difficult to manage.

 

** Kan-sui therapy refers to a method in which a patient was confined inside a metal cage while water (often distilled water) was poured from above, with the aim of calming states of agitation. Although it was treated as a therapeutic device for mental illness, it was also reportedly used as an apparatus of physical restraint.
In Japanese, the term kan-sui(灌水) literally means watering plants or crops.
 

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