In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of
silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It
offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific
Islands' most enduring psychiatric institution-St Giles Psychiatric
Hospital-established as Fiji's Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her
nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji's indigenous, migrant,
and colonial communities and examines how individuals and
communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically
complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s
to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder
in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and
within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender,
economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by
the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that
reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages,
workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of
the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and
colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of
colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One
of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within
colonial worlds and practices. The "community within" the asylum is
a feature in Leckie's study, with attention to patient agency to
show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds,
confinement, and constraints-ranging from straitjackets to electric
shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in
colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the
community, and that "reading" asylum archives sheds new light on
race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji. Exploring the
meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from
asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define
normality and abnormality and also how communities respond.
Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers
an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional
history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in
mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current
efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a
reality for all in postcolonial societies.
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