Colonial psychiatry

Abstract

Within the medical science of psychiatry, the definitions of normal psychological functioning were originally rooted deeply in European culture. As psychiatry spread around the world alongside European imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tensions emerged as colonial institutions attempted to use psychiatry to define, diagnose, and treat mental illness in non-European populations. Historians have shown that, while colonial psychiatrists believed in the universal nature of their science, how they defined normal and abnormal behaviour was deeply embedded in the imperial mindset of European politics, culture, and science. Colonial psychiatric knowledge and practice were resisted, adapted, and transformed by colonial subjects through their engagement with colonial asylums, European medical science, and political activism. This chapter examines the history and historiography of European colonial psychiatry in Africa and Asia through an examination of colonial lunatic asylums, psychiatric research on the nature of the “native mind” and its pathologies, psychiatric and psychoanalytic critiques of colonial psychiatry, and the effects of decolonisation on the transformation of psychiatric theory and practice in what was soon to become the Third World.