Mandatory Madness
Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine

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

Chris Sandal-Wilson (Author)

9781009430388, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 May 2025

360 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.521 kg

'Sandal-Wilson employs a wide array of sources to shed light on the complicated history of psychiatric care in Mandatory Palestine … By widening the lens to include diverse sources and actors, Sandal-Wilson has created a compelling book that provides important and unique insights into life in Mandatory Palestine … Highly recommended for scholars of British Mandate Palestine, the Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian relations, the history of medicine, colonial medicine, and the history of psychiatry, especially in colonial settings.' J. Rankin, Choice

Mandatory Madness offers a 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 an eclectic mix of archival and published material, Mandatory Madness reveals how a range of actors - British colonial officials, Zionist health workers, Arab doctors and nurses, and Palestinian families - 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: not only in underfunded and overcrowded government mental hospitals and private Jewish clinics, certainly, but also in family homes and neighbourhood streets, in colonial courtrooms and prisons and census offices, and in the itineraries of shaykhs and patients alike as they crossed newly drawn borders within the Levant. 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]