Outrageous Reason

Peter Barham has been working, writing and engaging critically in the mental health field for more than 50 years. His work straddles clinical research, psychoanalysis, practical initiative, historical inquiry, mental health activism and film making. He has a PhD in abnormal psychology from the University of Durham and in modern history from the University of Cambridge. He is a chartered psychologist and was elected a fellow of the British Psychological Society for his 'outstanding contribution to psychological approaches to the understanding of psychosis'. He is the founder of the Hamlet Trust, which pioneered grassroots mental health reform in Central and Eastern Europe, supported by George Soros' Open Society Institute. His books include Schizophrenia and Human Value (1995), first published 1984, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (2004, 2007) and Closing the Asylum: The mental patient in modern society, first published in 1992 and reissued in 2020.

Foreword by Dwight Turner, Introduction, 1. Credibility, madness and race, Part 1 Jamaica, slavery and madness, Prologue, 2. From Zorg to Zong: The Zong affair, 3. A testimony from the female lunatic asylum: Henrietta Dawson and her distress, 4. In the bowels of colonial modernity, 5. The 'beneficent despotism' of racial liberalism, 6. Revivalists, Rastafari and psychiatry, Part 2Poor whites, Prologue, 7. The mad poor as poor whites, 8. Alice Rebecca Triggs: War, madness and migration, Part 3 Pathologies of empire, Prologue, 9. The strange career of R.R. Racey: Mad at his post or the madness of colonialism?, 10. The Mir of Khairpur: Imperial doubts about his 'fitness' to rule, Part 4 Holds that kill, Prologue, 11. Winston Rose: Humanity violated, 12. Orville Blackwood: Humanity disavowed, Part 5 After, Prologue, 13. Disturbing continuities, 14. Burn the ship! Escape the hold!