Psychiatric partitions: the politics of mental illness in states of collapse

ongoing

Psychiatric Partitions will transform our understanding of the relationship between politics and psychiatry in the twentieth century. Through its distinctive focus on the global phenomenon of partition – the practice of dividing and redistributing territory, population, and sovereignty – since the First World War, it will contribute the first systematic account of how questions around mental health and psychiatry mattered in these times of acute political and social crisis spanning decades and continents. Often described as ‘traumatic’, the psychiatric history of these cataclysms is more complex than trauma alone, encompassing tussles between departing and emergent states about responsibility for psychiatric populations; interventions by humanitarian organisations to prop up institutions and safeguard patients; the dilemmas faced by families around the care of unwell relatives. By identifying three cross-cutting research strands – responsibility, experience, knowledge – this project pioneers a framework for analysing the interaction between politics and psychiatry in times of crisis, and reimagines the history of partition from the perspective of a profoundly marginalised group: psychiatric patients. Interweaving archival and oral historical research into a carefully selected set of case studies across the century with longitudinal analysis of the history of international efforts to manage mental health in partition times, the project models an innovative contrapuntal approach to global history. Psychiatric Partitions matters not simply because it will drive forward the scholarship on partition, psychiatry, and global history, but because neither the legacies nor logics of partition thinking have left us today. It will allow for a fuller appreciation of the human stakes when partition is proposed and debated today, and sound a warning: that humanitarian interventions made in the name of care can end up implicated in the violent politics of population reordering.