Madness, Vice and Tabanka: Post-colonial Residues in Trinidadian Conceptualisations of Mental Illness

Abstract

How directly relevant was clinical psychiatry to imperialism? Both evidently developed in the same period. They shared certain modes of reasoning. We might note, for instance, affinities between the scientific objectification of illness experience as disease and the objectification of people as chattel slaves or colonial manpower;² both argued for an absence of ‘higher’ functions or sense of personal responsibility among patients and non-Europeans. The extent, however, to which an elaborated set of ideas which might be termed ‘imperial psychiatry’ provided a rationale for colonialism in British Africa or India³ is debatable: in recent reviews I have argued that the evidence is fairly meagre. With remarkably few exceptions,⁴ the small number of colonial psychiatrists barely participated in the theoretical debates of early cultural psychiatry: segregated facilities, of course;⁵ prejudice and neglect, undoubtedly; but hardly practicable ideologies for racial or cultural inferiority.

Part of this material was published in Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad (Cambridge: 1993) and ‘Psychiatry’s Culture’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 42 (1996) 245–68.