Overview

Mandatory Madness offers a fresh new perspective on a pivotal period in the history of modern Palestine, by putting mental illness and the psychiatric encounters it engendered at the heart of the story. Through a careful and creative reading of a wide range of archival and published material in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, Chris Sandal-Wilson reveals how a range of actors responded to mental illness in the decades before 1948. Rather than a concern of European Jewish psychiatric experts alone, questions around the causes, nature, and treatment of mental illness were negotiated across diverse and sometimes surprising sites in mandate Palestine. Bringing together histories of medicine, colonialism, and the modern Middle East, Mandatory Madness highlights how the seemingly personal and private matter of mental illness generated distinctive forms of entanglement: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region.

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9781009430371

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Reviews

'Mandatory Madness is an important contribution to a modest but growing body of works that are challenging national and ideological narratives that have dominated the history of the Middle East far too long. Chris Sandal-Wilson weaves meticulously and soberly a fragmented history of mental health care in a highly contentious part of the world and compellingly demonstrates how disturbing and questioning the archive of colonial psychiatry can be performed.' Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Harvard University 'Mandatory Madness is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of Mandate Palestine and the history of the psy-sciences. Sandal-Wilson brilliantly assembles British officials, Palestinians and Jewish émigrés from the archive to demonstrate how colonial officials sought to render madness legible and calculable, while patients and families sought to render madness manageable. The result is a rich social history of Mandate Palestine which recenters the history of mental illness and psychiatry from a patient perspective and takes place as much in institutional settings as it does in homes and other quotidian social spaces.' Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis

Author Information

Chris Sandal-Wilson is a Lecturer in Medical History at the University of Exeter. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge and was previously a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.

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