Psychiatry and Empire


Book Description

'Psychiatry and Empire' brings together scholars in the History of Medicine and Colonialism to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with the psychology of colonial rule.




Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda


Book Description

This open access book investigates psychiatry in Uganda during the years of decolonisation. It examines the challenges facing a new generation of psychiatrists as they took over responsibility for psychiatry at the end of empire, and explores the ways psychiatric practices were tied to shifting political and development priorities, periods of instability, and a broader context of transnational and international exchange. At its heart is a question that has concerned psychiatrists globally since the mid-twentieth century: how to bridge the social and cultural gap between psychiatry and its patients? Bringing together archival research with oral histories, Yolana Pringle traces how this question came to dominate both national and international discussions on mental health care reform, including at the World Health Organization, and helped spur a culture of experimentation and creativity globally. As Pringle shows, however, the history of psychiatry during the years of decolonisation remained one of marginality, and ultimately, in the context of war and violence, the decolonisation of psychiatry was incomplete.




Ruling Minds


Book Description

At its zenith in the early twentieth century, the British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world’s inhabitants. As they worked to exercise power in diverse and distant cultures, British authorities relied to a surprising degree on the science of mind. Ruling Minds explores how psychology opened up new possibilities for governing the empire. From the mental testing of workers and soldiers to the use of psychoanalysis in development plans and counterinsurgency strategy, psychology provided tools for measuring and managing the minds of imperial subjects. But it also led to unintended consequences. Following researchers, missionaries, and officials to the far corners of the globe, Erik Linstrum examines how they used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and even dream analysis to chart abilities and emotions. Psychology seemed to offer portable and standardized forms of knowledge that could be applied to people everywhere. Yet it also unsettled basic assumptions of imperial rule. Some experiments undercut the racial hierarchies that propped up British dominance. Others failed to realize the orderly transformation of colonized societies that experts promised and officials hoped for. Challenging our assumptions about scientific knowledge and empire, Linstrum shows that psychology did more to expose the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.




The Empire of Depression


Book Description

Depression has colonized the world. Today, more than 300 million of us have been diagnosed as depressed. But 150 years ago, "depression" referred to a mood, not a sickness. Does that mean people weren't sick before, only sad? Of course not. Mental illness is a complex thing, part biological, part social, its definition dependent on time and place. But in the mid-twentieth century, even as European empires were crumbling, new Western clinical models and treatments for mental health spread across the world. In so doing, "depression" began to displace older ideas like "melancholia," the Japanese "utsushô," or the Punjabi "sinking heart" syndrome. Award-winning historian Jonathan Sadowsky tells this global story, chronicling the path-breaking work of psychiatrists and pharmacists, and the intimate sufferings of patients. Revealing the continuity of human distress across time and place, he shows us how different cultures have experienced intense mental anguish, and how they have tried to alleviate it. He reaches an unflinching conclusion: the devastating effects of depression are real. A number of treatments do reduce suffering, but a permanent cure remains elusive. Throughout the history of depression, there have been overzealous promoters of particular approaches, but history shows us that there is no single way to get better that works for everyone. Like successful psychotherapy, history can liberate us from the negative patterns of the past.




Psychiatry and Empire


Book Description

'Psychiatry and Empire' brings together scholars in the History of Medicine and Colonialism to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with the psychology of colonial rule.




The Empire of Trauma


Book Description

This work shows how, during the 20th century, the perspective on victims of trauma shifted from suspicion to recognition. From these ethnographical fieldworks, the authors thus propose a broader perspective on the political and moral issues of contemporary societies.




Colonial Madness


Book Description

Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.




The Routledge International Handbook of Race, Culture and Mental Health


Book Description

This handbook presents a thorough examination of the intricate interplay of race, ethnicity, and culture in mental health – historical origins, subsequent transformations, and the discourses generated from past and present mental health and wellness practices. The text demonstrates how socio-cultural identities including race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability, religion, and age intersect with clinical work in a range of settings. Case vignettes and recommendations for best practice help ground each in a clinical focus, guiding practitioners and educators to actively increase their understanding of non-Western and indigenous healing techniques, as well as their awareness of contemporary mental health theories as a product of Western culture with a particular historical and cultural perspective. The international contributors also discuss ways in which global mental health practices transcend racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and political boundaries. The Routledge International Handbook of Race, Culture and Mental Health is an essential resource for students, researchers, and professionals alike as it addresses the complexity of mental health issues from a critical, global perspective.




Asfuriyyeh


Book Description

The development of psychiatry in the Middle East, viewed through the history of one of the first modern mental hospitals in the region. &ʿA&ṣf&ūriyyeh (formally, the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane) was founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary in 1896, one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in the Middle East. It closed its doors in 1982, a victim of Lebanon's brutal fifteen-year civil war. In this book, Joelle Abi-Rached uses the rise and fall of &ʿA&ṣf&ūriyyeh as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the sociopolitical history of modern Lebanon.




Ethnopsychiatry


Book Description

What is the relationship between culture and mental health? Is mental illness universal? Are symptoms of mental disorders different across social groups? In the late 1960s these questions gave rise to a groundbreaking series of articles written by the psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger, who would go on to publish The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry in 1970. Fifty years later they are presented for the first time in English translation, introduced by historian of science Emmanuel Delille. Ethnopsychiatry explores one of the most controversial subjects in psychiatric research: the role of culture in mental health. In his articles Ellenberger addressed the complex clinical and theoretical problems of cultural specificity in mental illness, collective psychoses, differentiations within cultural groups, and biocultural interactions. He was especially attuned to the correlations between rapid cultural transformations in postwar society, urbanization, and the frequency of mental illness. Ellenberger drew from a vast and varied primary and secondary literature in several languages, as well as from his own findings in clinical practice, which included work with indigenous peoples. In analyzing Ellenberger's contributions Delille unveils the transnational and interdisciplinary origins of transcultural psychiatry, which grew out of knowledge networks that crisscrossed the globe. The book has a rich selection of appendices, including Ellenberger's lecture notes on a case of peyote addiction and his correspondence with anthropologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux. These original essays, and their masterful contextualization, provide a compelling introduction to the foundations of transcultural psychiatry and one of its most distinguished and prolific researchers.




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