Mobilities and mental health in the modern Middle East: beyond methodological nationalism in the history of colonial psychiatry

Lecture with Chris Sandal-Wilson, University of Exeter

Movement and mental ill health have long been entangled in complex ways. Through a focus on the Levant across the first half of the twentieth century, this talk argues for the importance of attending to mobilities within histories of psychiatry and of colonial psychiatry in particular.

Contemporary discussions of the relationship between migration and mental health focus on identifying the risk and protective factors which might account for higher reported prevalence of mental ill health among migrants and refugees. A historical perspective reveals that while there is nothing necessarily new in causally connecting migration and mental ill health, movement and mental health have been linked in a wider range of ways in the past. Across the first half of the twentieth century in the modern Middle East, the role played by migration as a cause of mental illness was variously discussed. But movement was also, as this talk demonstrates, a response to the occurrence of mental illness, as families and friends plotted out the long-distance movement of the mentally ill in their efforts to access care and cure, even across the colonial partition of the region which followed the end of the First World War. The responses of families to mental illness were seldom neatly contained by colonial or national boundaries, and a correspondingly transnational perspective is needed to fully understand the social history of psychiatry in this context. Drawing on multi-sited archival research, this talk argues that foregrounding mobility more sharply highlights the agency exercised by families and communities, and not just medical experts and government officials, in shaping the history of (colonial) psychiatry.

Bio

Chris Sandal-Wilson is a lecturer in the history of medicine at the University of Exeter, where he teaches and researches the history of psychiatry, colonialism, and the modern Middle East. His first book, Mandatory Madness: Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine, was published at the end of 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and his work has also appeared in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, The Historical Journal, and other journals. He earned his PhD from the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and was a lecturer in the history of the modern Middle East at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the University of East Anglia prior to taking up his current post at the University of Exeter in 2021.