Mandatory Madness

Bringing together Middle East studies, histories of empire, and the medical humanities, Mandatory Madness offers an innovative and deeply researched new social and cultural history of Palestine before 1948, and a rethinking of the history and archives of psychiatry from a non-Western context under British colonial rule.

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Mandatory Madness offers a fresh 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 a wide range of archival and published material in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, Chris Sandal-Wilson reveals how a range of actors 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. 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.