Going in and Getting out of the Colonial Asylum: Families and Psychiatric Care in French Indochina

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores the movements of asylum patients in and out of psychiatric care in French Indochina as the product of everyday interactions between psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the public, especially patients' families. Throughout the interwar years, families and communities actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that disrupt our notions of the colonial asylum as a closed setting that patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad, unquestioned authority. Vietnamese families, by debating individuals' suitability for social life, engaged with professional psychiatrists to find common ground for thinking about and discussing mental illness. At the same time, they pursued their own strategies in ways that significantly limited the power of experts. Debates revolved around the mental health of patients, but also around the capacity of families to assume their care upon release, and whether the asylum itself was the most appropriate site for treatment and rehabilitation. By considering how lay people and experts came together to negotiate the confinement and release of asylum patients, this paper offers a novel perspective on the development of psychiatric knowledge and power in colonial settings. I argue that by situating the history of psychiatry within the local dynamics of colonial rule as opposed to expert discourse, the asylum emerges here less as a blunt instrument for the social control and medicalization of colonial society than as a valuable historical site for reframing narratives of colonial repression and resistance.