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

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.