Week 7 Flashcards
Intro to colonialism
- Both historic and contemporary
- Not exclusively European, post 16th C. variant particularly worth of attention
- European colonialism positions itself as kind/ helpful
Loomba: Colonialism
colonialism as “the conquest/ control of other people’s land and goods”
Justifying the Colonial Project
Psy-disciplines generated knowledge and scientific “facts” that have helped to facilitate colonialism
Fanon: Colonial Project
North Africans imagined as incapable of controlling impulses, exercising self-discipline
Gordon: Colonial Project
African reasoning ability as inferior
Corothers: Colonial Project
African mind “childlike”, incapable of handling responsibility of democracy, diminished frontal lobes
Ernst: Colonial Project
construction of asylums in India “contributed to maintenance of self-image of British as superior people whose charitable humanitarianism and rational, scientific achievements made colonial rule appear morally beneficial/ legitimate”
Psy-ences and slavery
Psy-disciplines facilitated slavery by reinforcing notion that some racial groups “natural state” was one of servitude/ inferiority
Drapetomania
where slaves run away: give food, clothes, and limited social time to “cure” (framed as an issue with the individual NOT their treatment)
Dysaethesia Aethiopica
destroying farm equipment/ slacking
Constructing Race
Colonial psy has tended to approach colonized patients not as individuals, but as racial stereotypes: in doing so helped to build very notion of racial differences
- Residential schools premised upon idea that race-based mindsets existed and could be (needed to be) fundamentally reshaped
Vaughan: Constructing Race
psy’s greatest contribution to colonialism was its framing of “normal mind” of Africans, rather than a pathological one
Kocher: Constructing Race
argued that violence inherent to Islamic culture; assimilation of Frenchness would resolve it
Facilitating Colonialism
- Psy world also important to bureaucratic machine of colonialism, providing system to categorize/ classify people
- By producing assessments on “Indigenous psychologies” psy-discipline conferred an imagined rationality, further justifying “civilizing mission”
- Such technologies provided rationale for intensified colonial violence
Kloos: Facilitating Colonialism
implied “control” where colonial authorities often struggled to achieve it
McCullogh: Facilitating Colonialism
Carothers warned that British “civilizing mission” would be futile
Native Madness
- Psy argued that mental illness was comparatively rare among Native populations due to “simplicity”
- Eg. depression and African continent
- “Civilization” despite being ostensible goal of colonial regimes, framed as the cause of madness itself
- most continued to receive traditional care
Carothers: Native Madness
Mau Mau result of mental pathology
Ernst: Protecting the colonizer
- Diagnosis of British worked to uphold image of superiority; those whose behaviour threatened this image were repatriated
- “Going native” cause of concern; sign of insanity and potential cause of it
- Eg. marrying native, adopting culture, etc.
Racial differences in care
- India: full segregation, better facilities for Europeans, hard labour only for Indians, etc.
- Often differences in treatment (white = psychologic / Indian = somatic)
- Canadian Indigenous patients were sterilized under eugenics laws at high rates
Sandowsky: Care differences
Nigeria had no treatment for locals into 1950s (prison/ asylum = the same)
Swartz: Care differences
black people more likely to die of infections because of asylum housing
How did psy play role in framing resistance as insanity
- As care care was carceral, added “benefit” of removing agitators
- Psy positioned madness as individual pathology, rather than reflection of colonial context
- Cynical act OR reflection of colonial worldview? (THIS IS STILL HAPPENING)
- NOT necessarily evil: just wanted to push ONLY their own culture
Dick: Suppressing dissent
pibloktoq = “arctic hysteria” built off of 1 white interaction with an Indigenous woman
Kloos: Suppressing dissent
Atjeh-moorden blamed on “primordial” character of Acehnese and their tendency to insanity
Swartz: Suppressing Dissent
those who disrupted economic order subject to clinical attention/ treatment
Contemporary manifestations
Indigenous individuals still overrepresented in mental health systems
- “Modern suicide crisis” as mental health concern?
- “Intergenerational trauma” as a diagnostic concept?
- Individualized social problem of colonialism
McGibbon: Contemporary manifestations
“psychiatrization” mental health problems as apolitical, devoid of social context
- Oppression produced mental illness, yet reads impacts as individual and not political
psychiatric dimensions of colonialism
- Inferiority, shame, inefficacy
- Colonizer culture/ practice as superior, modern, dignified
- Assimilation not possible, at best “3rd class” status achievable
Conclusions
- Significance of psy disciplines not only that they define psychiatric deviance, but they define what is normal
- Many ideas propagated by colonial psychiatry outlive formal colonization itself
Christopher & Hickinbottom: Conclusions
human science always reflects socio-cultural setting of those that set disciplines’ norms and standards
- In context of colonialism, science produced by psy justified, facilitated and maintained
