Abstract
The purpose of this study is to describe fan, a culturally constructed expression of emotional and psychological discomfort, from the perspective of 34 suicidal patients in Taipei, Taiwan. An important finding from this ethnographic study is an idiom of emotional distress, fan, which is not expressed as related to a body part like in most previous research on expressions of psychological symptoms in Chinese cultures. This description will help health professionals better understand what fan means to Chinese patients and what methods they use to cope with it.