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Decolonising madness? Transcultural psychiatry, international order and the emergence of the 鈥榞lobal psyche鈥�

By Ana Antic, Lamia Moghnieh, Shilpi Rajpal, Gabriel Abarca-Brown. This talk will be held by

The project 鈥楧ecolonising Madness鈥� explores the emergence and development of the discipline of transcultural psychiatry in the twentieth century. It examines how some of the most important political events, such as the Second World War, colonial conflicts and decolonisation, shaped the institutionalisation of global psychiatry and its increasing engagement with the relationship between culture and mental illness. In this talk, the four project members will discuss their argument that the concept of a global psyche and universal humanity is not a recent development, but that it emerged in the mid-twentieth century and was centrally shaped by the processes of decolonisation. At that time, leading psychiatric figures across the world embarked on identifying, debating and sometimes critiquing the universal psychological characteristics and psychopathological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures and 鈥榗ivilisations鈥�. Was global psychiatry successful in removing itself from its erstwhile colonial frameworks? How did the profession negotiate the tensions between researching cultural particularities and developing new, cross-cultural models of the mind? The project explores the multiple voices - Chilean, Indian, Lebanese, Yugoslav, Tunisian, Soviet, Sudanese, Ghanaian - which took part in these discussions. How did their perspectives shape the field, how did they grapple with its colonial and racist aspects, and why does their role now seem to be so radically diminished?

Ana Antic is a professor of European history at the University of Copenhagen, and a social and cultural historian of psychiatry. She is the author of Therapeutic fascism: Experiencing the violence of the Nazi New Order (2017) and Non-aligned psychiatry in the Cold War (2022), and leader of the new Centre for Culture and the Mind.

Lamia Moghnieh is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen, a mental health practitioner and a medical anthropologist. Her upcoming book manuscript, provisionally entitled Psychiatric Afterlives: Narrating Illness, Gender, and Violence in Lebanon offers a new history of psychiatry and public life in Lebanon that critically engages with the voices of patients and therapeutic communities since the 1930 to present day.

Shilpi Rajpal is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen, and a social historian of psychiatry in colonial India. Her book 'Curing Madness? A Social and Cultural History of Insanity in North India, 1800-1950s', was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Curing Madness focuses on both institutional and non-institutional histories of madness in colonial North India.

Gabriel Abarca-Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and medical anthropologist. His research focuses on the intersections between psy-disciplines, global mental health, subjectivity, and everyday life. He has co-edited the book entitled 鈥�Somos sujetos cerebrales? Neurociencias, Salud Mental y Sociedad鈥� (2022/in press). Currently, he is working on the book manuscript entitled 鈥淏ecoming a (neuro)migrant in Santiago, Chile鈥� and starting a new research project on the birth of transcultural psychiatry during the 鈥淐hilean way鈥� to socialism during the 60-70s.