Black Skin, White Coats - Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Paperback, New)

"Black Skin, White Coats" is a history of psychiatry in Nigeria from the 1950s to the 1980s. Working in the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to replace racist colonial psychiatric theories about the psychological inferiority of Africans with a universal and egalitarian model focusing on broad psychological similarities across cultural and racial boundaries. Particular emphasis is placed on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the first indigenous Nigerian to earn a specialty degree in psychiatry in the United Kingdom in 1954. Lambo returned to Nigeria to become the medical superintendent of the newly founded Aro Mental Hospital in Abeokuta, Nigeria's first "modern" mental hospital. At Aro, Lambo began to revolutionize psychiatric research and clinical practice in Nigeria, working to integrate "modern" western medical theory and technologies with "traditional" cultural understandings of mental illness. Lambo's research focused on deracializing psychiatric thinking and redefining mental illness in terms of a model of universal human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.
"Black Skin, White Coats" is the first work to focus primarily on black Africans as producers of psychiatric knowledge and as definers of mental illness in their own right. By examining the ways that Nigerian psychiatrists worked to integrate their psychiatric training with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, "Black Skin, White Coats" provides a foil to Frantz Fanon's widely publicized reactionary articulations of the relationship between colonialism and psychiatry. "Black Skin, White Coats" is also on the cutting edge of histories of psychiatry that are increasingly drawing connections between local and national developments in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and international scientific networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists were intimately aware of the need to engage in international discourses as part and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.

General

Imprint:	Ohio University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	New African Histories
Release date:	October 2013
First published:	2013
Authors:	Matthew M Heaton
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	288
Edition:	New
ISBN-13:	978-0-8214-2070-6
Categories:	Books > Medicine > General issues > History of medicine Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General Books > Humanities > History > African history > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social welfare & social services > Care of the mentally ill Books > History > African history > General
LSN:	0-8214-2070-4
Barcode:	9780821420706

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