Sovereignty, Security, Psychiatry: Liberation and the Failure of Mental Health Governance in Iraq

Abstract

This article examines how psychiatry has been used as a technology of security in post-‘liberation’ Iraq. Drawing on Foucault and Foucauldian work on the history and sociology of medicine, it begins by tracing how, from the 19th century onwards, psychiatry has instantiated its authority through a claim to provide social security within national spaces, both through methods of sovereign confinement and through liberation and governance. Arguing that the various ‘psy’ disciplines — and medicine more generally — are increasingly used as technologies of security internationally, the article examines psychiatric practice in Iraq, where patients in the Al Rashad psychiatric institution were accidentally liberated from their confinement by US Marines in 2003. Iraq’s ‘mentally ill’ were initially considered a manageable security threat and thus subject to liberal community governance efforts. Yet, after the so-called suicide bombing of two pet markets in 2008, reportedly by former Al Rashad patients, those deemed ‘mentally ill’ and others associated with them were once again made subject to sovereign confinement, marking a failure in liberal governance. Thus, this article seeks to explore some of the complex lines connecting sovereignty, security and psychiatry in post-‘liberation’ Iraq, and in global politics more generally.