White phychiatrists, black masks: on the racial imperative in critical psychiatry

Abstract

This paper addresses a seemingly marginal branch lf phychiarty: cross-cultural psychiatry and its moral precepts. Exceptional in its familiarity with critical social theories, cross-cultural psychiatry engages with the social and political issue of black people's mental health. The socio-clinical interventions made by the anti-racist psychiatrist as a ‘race-relations’ expert and truth-teller are investigated via a case-study. The ethical self-fashioning of psychiatrists with black patients is examined. It also aims to tease out which ethical regimes of truth, techniques of conscience-formation and direction incite psychiatrists to tell-the-truth about racist oppression and its relation to mental disorder; and to foreground some of the possible ethical and political consequences of anti-racist psychiatric interventions.