The Most Social of Maladies: Re-Thinking the History of Psychiatry From the Edges of Empire

Claire Edington

doi:10.1007/s11013-021-09723-8

Abstract

This paper argues that the colonial experience was never just “out there” but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, indeed, of social medicine itself. I show how regional knowledge about psychiatry, produced in scientific exchanges across colonial Southeast Asia over four decades and culminating with the 1937 Bandung Conference, became part of new international approaches to health care in rural areas, and later, in developing nations. In particular, I discuss how the embrace of the agricultural colony as a solution to the problem of asylum overcrowding occurred at the same moment that colonial public health experts and officials were moving away from expensive, technocratic fixes to address indigenous health needs. Yet in the search for alternatives to institutionalized care, including forms of family and community support, colonial psychiatrists were increasingly drawn into unpredictable and unwieldy networks of care and economy. Drawing on research from Vietnam, this paper decenters the asylum so as to recast the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry as integral to the history of social medicine and global health. The paper then returns to Bandung in 1955, the site of another famous meeting in the history of Third World solidarity, to consider how the embrace of the “Bandung spirit” may provide new avenues for decolonizing the history of colonial and postcolonial psychiatry.

Highlights

This paper argues that the colonial experience was never just ‘‘out there’’ but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, of social medicine itself
This article argues that the colonial experience was never just ‘‘out there’’ but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, of social medicine itself
Psychiatry as social medicine—at least as it was imagined in colonial Southeast Asia—promised to cut costs by relying on families to provide care and by disciplining a labor force adapted to the needs of the regional plantation economy

Summary

Introduction

This article argues that the colonial experience was never just ‘‘out there’’ but was a constitutive feature of the global development of psychiatry and, of social medicine itself. Colonial Vietnam itself emerged as a node in growing regional health networks in the early decades of the twentieth century These inter-imperial and, increasingly international, exchanges went far toward establishing Southeast Asia in the minds of indigenous and colonial experts alike as a coherent entity, a shared object of knowledge that could be investigated, managed, and exploited using similar methods. At the 1937 Bandung meeting, Southeast Asia figured centrally in international conversations about rural hygiene as a way to mitigate the effects of agrarian depression worldwide These conversations about the indigenization of health care, in the countryside, refracted back to Indochina, shaping the colonial public health landscape in important ways. It speculates on what a decolonial reading of the 1937 meeting might look like and what such a perspective would contribute to our understanding of histories of social medicine and global health more generally

The View from Bandung

The View from Colonial Vietnam

Back to Bandung

Conclusion