Table of Contents

Introduction; I: 1. Psychiatry in Palestine between the Ottomans and the British; 2. Enumerating insanity: pathologies, translations, and the census; II: 3. Petitions, families, and pathways to the asylum; 4. Insanity before the courts: defining abnormality, punishing normalcy; 5. Getting in and getting out of the criminal lunatic section; III: 6. Investing in psychiatric institutions and expertise into the 1940s; 7. Treating the mentally ill: work, drugs, and electricity; Epilogue: partitions and afterlives.

Promotional Information

Mandatory Madness offers an unprecedented social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in Palestine under British rule before 1948.

About the Author

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.

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 offers a unique glimpse into complicated relationships between scientific expertise, colonial institutions and diverse indigenous populations in Mandate Palestine, using psychiatry and mental illness as the primary lens of analysis. Sandal-Wilson's research is a model example of how historians of psychiatry and psychopathology can open unexpected windows onto mainstream social and political histories, and histories of everyday life. The book offers a nuanced account of Ottoman and British imperial entanglements in Palestine, and moves beyond psychiatry's institutional boundaries in innovative ways in order to foreground the voices and agency of patients and their families.' Ana Antic, University of Copenhagen

'Through its focus on mental health and the biomedical institutions that sought to treat it, Sandal-Wilson's thoughtful work shines light on an unexplored facet of Palestinian history as well as the expectations and dynamics that structured interactions between Palestinians and the British mandate authorities.' Jennifer Derr, University of California, Santa Cruz

'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, Yale University

'A brilliant examination of the Palestinian engagement with mental illness and colonial psychiatric practice during the Mandate period. This book fills a necessary void on this almost tabooed subject in literature on madness in the Arab world. Sandal-Wilson's Mandatory Madness scholarly work is enhanced by an accessible and thrilling style that reads like a detective novel, including a number of case studies that humanises the bureaucratic reporting about mental illness, such as the story of patient Mariam B, and the tragic saga of Hassan al-Labadi, who was driven into madness by his continued political incarceration.' Salim Tamari, Birzeit University