Psychiatry, Confinement, and Racialisation
Time: 3rd and 4th April 2025
Location: Birkbeck, University of London, 30 Russell Square Room 101 London WC1B 5DT
Limited space is available for the workshop, attendees can book here
Nana Quarshie’s public lecture is free and open, booking available here. The keynote will be followed by a drinks reception, and dinner for speakers.
Catering is provided, with refreshments and lunch on both days including vegan and vegetarian options.
Papers are expected to be 15-20 minutes long, followed by questions and discussion. If needed, please upload slides before the workshop on this drive.
This workshop is hosted by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Mental Health and the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and is supported by the Birkbeck Research Innovation Fund, UKRI, and the Wellcome Trust.
Day 1: Thursday 3rd April
10:30am Arrivals, coffee and registration
11am: Session 1: Colonial medicine: ideas, infrastructure and violence: Shilpi Rajpal, Lamia Moghnieh, Rob Knox | Chair: Keiran Wilson
Psychiatrists and Psychiatry: The development of Mental Health Infrastructure in India, Shilpi Rajpal, University of Copenhagen
Trauma, Resilience in Lebanon: Politics of suffering from Israeli Violence, Lamia Moghnieh, University of Copenhagen
Respondent: Rob Knox, University of Liverpool
12:30pm – Lunch
2pm: Session 2: Carceral formations and resistance
Luisa Schneider, Elisa Boeri, Hil Aked and Sarah Lasoye, Medact | Chair: Kojo Koram
Domestic Colonisation, Psychiatry, and the Carceral State in East Germany, Luisa T Schneider, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Psychiatric confinement as a punitive and political act in Fascist Italy: spaces and places of segregation (1926-1943), Elisa Boeri, Politecnico di Milano
Abolition and Securitisation in Healthcare, Hil Aked and Sarah Lasoye, MedAct
4pm – Coffee break
6pm: Keynote lecture, followed by drinks reception and dinner for speakers
Keynote: African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return | Nana Osei Quarshie, Yale University
Location: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre, 27 Torrington Square London WC1E 7JL
8pm: Dinner for speakers
Day 2: Friday 4th April
11am: Arrivals, coffee and opening reflection
12pm – Session 3: Reforms, Transformations and Alternate Psychiatries
Pantxo Ramas, Tiago Pires Marques, Gabriel Abarca Brown | Chair: Becka Hudson
The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform in the Face of Colonialism and Racism, Tiago Pires Marques, University of Coimbra
Crimes of Peace’: A Preliminary Decolonial Examination of Franco Basaglia’s Thought, Pantxo Ramas, Barcelona
The Chilean Road to Socialism, Psychiatry, and the Omission of Ethnicity and Race, Gabriel Abarca-Brown, University of Copenhagen
1:30pm – Lunch
2:30pm – Closing roundtable: Workshop Reflections and Next Steps
Sushrut Jadhav (UCL) Ursula Read (University of Essex), Adam Elliot Cooper (Queen Mary University of London) | Chair: Sarah Marks
Questions of the workshop:
- How are medical, psychoanalytic and behaviourist strains of thought involved in constructing, healing and controlling racialised populations today?
- How have patterns of psychiatrically informed confinement been integrated into colonial domination?
- How have these practices been enmeshed with rhythms of capitalist accumulation and crisis historically? How does this configure today?
- What kinds of therapeutic engagement are possible that depart from medical diagnosis, what have attempts to decolonise and open up psychiatric practice into new avenues produced?
- What do contemporary advancements in psy practice – including the use of new technologies – propose as to where this relationship between psy disciplines, racialisation and ‘carcerality’ is going?
List of abstracts and bios:
11am: Session 1: Colonial medicine: ideas, infrastructure and violence
Psychiatrists and Psychiatry: The development of Mental Health Infrastructure in India, Shilpi Rajpal
The lack of a curative treatment was foundational to colonial psychiatry in India. The mental hospitals were created as safe bastions for the patients and the public. The need for the asylum building was linked to the management of colonialism. The asylums for the ‘white’ were crucial for maintaining the image of Raj. The insane hospitals for the ‘natives’ were an extension of colonial medical paraphernalia. The asylums were not ‘the tools of empire’ but helped in ‘street clearing’ and dealing with ‘delinquent’ population. The focus of such institutions was the so called ‘dangerous’ population and it was widely practiced to keep the ‘harmless’ and ‘incurables’ outside these institutions. These policies suited the needs of colonialism. Nonetheless, psychiatrists had become an important professional body by the end of colonialism. The British and Indian psychiatrists articulated the need for better mental health care infrastructure.
The dawn of Independence is often regarded as a clear break in history. The paper investigates the making modern Indian of psychiatry in Independent India. It will attempt to juxtapose the vision of psychiatry in health care infrastructure with the ground reality of mental health. There is a need to encapsulate the structural inequalities that were a part and parcel of colonialism with the attempts to build new India. It will interrogate the role of government in the policy making of the mental health care program. Also, who were these policy makers and the architects of modern Indian psychiatry? It will attempt to comprehend the politics of psychiatry by reflecting on the health building program to encapsulate India’s internal and external position. India became a significant partner in a number of experimental studies conducted by the WHO. The paper will make sense of India’s emergence of a global partner in representing the developing countries mental health model to figuring out the absence of any internal coherent mental health policy.
Bio:Dr Shilpi Rajpal is primarily a social historian of psychiatry and at present is an ERC postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her project ‘Decolonising the Mind: Birth of the Global Mental Health Movement in India, 1920-1980s’ traces the local, national and global histories of psychiatry in colonial and post-colonial India. Her previous work, Curing Madness? A Social and Cultural History of Insanity in North India, 1800-1950s, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press, New Delhi. The book focuses on both institutional and non-institutional histories of madness in colonial North India. ‘Madness’ and ‘cure’ are explored as shifting categories, which travelled across cultural, medical, national, and regional boundaries, thereby moving beyond asylum centric histories.
Trauma, Resilience in Lebanon: Politics of suffering from Israeli Violence, Lamia Moghnieh
In this talk, I trace the psychiatric and cultural debates on trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Israeli violence in Lebanon from the invasion in 1982 until the July War in 2006. The role of psychiatric authority in shaping these debates have mostly been unstudied. While the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was one of the wars that helped further validate the diagnosis of PTSD in the DSM III—by focusing on the trauma causalities on the Israeli side—in Lebanon, psychiatrists struggled to detect and treat traumatized communities, declaring an absence of trauma. Starting from this alleged absence of suffering from Israeli war in Lebanon, I trace the many debates and claims that ensued around this absence between intellectuals, artists and scholars, political actors, and mental health experts, and in mediatized representations. Many of these debates centered on ideas and assumptions on Lebanese resilience, modernity and suffering, culture and primitivism to explain a trauma absence. I argue that trauma and resilience, as predicated and conceptualized by humanitarian psychiatry, are psychiatric categories embedded in the work of European modernity that allows for the legibility of suffering for some bodied and the killability of others.
Bio:Associate Professor at the Center for Culture and the Mind. Medical Anthropologist, psychotherapist and social worker, researching the histories and ethnographies of psychiatry, subject and society in South West Asia and North African societies
Respondent: Robert Knox
Bio: Robert is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. His research interests broadly encompass the relationship between law and the political-economic structures of capitalism. He has specific expertise on public international law, particularly on its relationship to race and empire; public law, with a focus on its relationship to neoliberalism, and legal theory, especially critical and Marxist approaches to the law. Robert is a member of the Editorial Boards of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and the London Review of International Law. He is also a member Isaac and Tamara Memorial Prize Prize Committee and sits on the board of the Left Book Club.
2pm: Session 2: Carceral formations and resistance
Domestic Colonisation, Psychiatry, and the Carceral State in East Germany, Luisa T. Schneider This presentation interrogates the carceral legacies of internal colonisation in East Germany, focusing on how the GDR weaponised psychiatric and social confinement to manage marginalised populations. Moving beyond the framework of colonial psychiatry as a tool of “Global North” domination over the “Global South,” it reveals how psychiatric and ideological systems created and disciplined internal “others.” Labour and re-education camps served as carceral spaces, combining forced labor, ideological re-education, and surveillance to enforce state-approved norms and marginalise those deemed deviant. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, including life histories of affected individuals, this research highlights the enduring psychological and material impacts of these practices. It connects the GDR’s carceral systems to contemporary punitive welfare policies, exploring the coloniality of psychiatric and social governance. Finally, it considers pathways for decolonising psychiatric practices and reimagining therapeutic interventions that resist carceral logics. This work situates the German case within global discussions on psychiatry’s role in constructing racialised subjectivities, showing how internal colonial practices echo and reshape frameworks of racialisation, confinement, and rehabilitation.
Bio: Luisa is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology, specialising in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law. She has been conducting ethnographic research in Sierra Leone since 2011 and in Germany since 2018. Through combining empirical research with conceptual synthesis, she studies how people negotiate the space to live their most intimate needs on various levels of social and legal organisation. She is particularly interested in the friction between care and control, between rights, protections and their practical realisation that arise from the divide between private and public spheres, both through the politico-legal separation between home/house and street, and through conflicting discourses regarding which areas of life states may regulate and in what way.
Psychiatric confinement as a punitive and political act in Fascist Italy: spaces and places of segregation (1926-1943), Elisa Boeri Between 1926 and 1943, 17,000 people were sentenced to political confinement in Italy. Although profoundly different from the collective concentration camps for purposes of elimination during the Second World War, the confinement camp also provided an unnatural community of men and women forced to share their lives in restricted and unhealthy spaces. Since the establishment of Italian penal colonies, the binomial “reclusion and work” further bring the worlds of asylum and confinement closer together, leading to inevitable reflections on the actuality and danger of forced exclusion from the social world. In 2024, four penal colonies are still active in Italy, three of which located in Sardinia, completely isolated from the rest of the peninsula. Yesterday as today, the reconstruction of the elements of psychological discomfort in detention spaces must consider the factor of time and its controlled organisation and planning. The data are merciless: of the inmates are migrants with no ties to the territory, isolated in the isolation of the colony. The psychiatric problems reported (Il Manifesto, August 2023) have extremely high rates and few responses from the institutions that should deal with them. This contribution aims to present the first results of an ongoing research, which is studying the employment of psychiatric confinement as a political act in the fascist regime, and its connections, unfortunately highly topical, with the policies of migratory exclusion and the consequent psychological distress on entire segments of population.
Bio: Elisa Boeri is Assistant Professor in History of Architecture at the ABC Department of the Politecnico di Milano. After her degree in architecture, she obtained a joint PhD in History of Art and Architecture (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and IUAV, 2016), with a dissertation focused on the graphic utopian work of the XVIII century French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu. Since 2023, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architectural Design ad History (JADH). Her studies concern the cultural and architectural model transfer between Italy and France, the theoretical teaching of architecture in twentieth-century Italy and the spaces of confinement and punishment in Italy and France (18th-20th centuries). Among her contributions to conferences and seminars on this topic: The ‘gallows speech’ between the Age of Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution. Punishment, isolation and escape in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Jean-Jacques Lequeu (International Colloquium, Jesi 3-5 October 2024); Spatial exclusion of the “Other”. Asylums and penal colonies in Italy (XIX-XX century), between social-geographical isolation and psychic suffering (International Colloquium “Spaces of Confinement: Memories of Repression and Coloniality”, Museu do Aljube, Lisbon 29-30 October 2024
Abolition and Securitisation in Healthcare, Hil Aked and Sarah Lasoye, MedAct. Medact’s Securitisation of Health Group is a new member group that works together toward a shift in how the concept of ‘security’ is viewed, politically and within society, to centre individual and collective health and well-being. This talk will cover their research and campaigning into increasing securitisation and policing in healthcare in the UK.
Bio: Dr Hil Aked (they/he) is a writer and investigative researcher with a background in political sociology who holds a PhD from the University of Bath and an MSc from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. They have conducted research on the ‘Israel lobby’, Islamophobia, neoconservative think tanks and the media, the far right, and civil society activism in the struggle for AIDS treatment in South Africa.
Sarah (she/her) began at Medact as Campaigns Officer, supporting the Peace and Security & Health and Human Rights campaign areas. Now as Peace & Security Campaign and Programme Lead, she leads MedAct’s work on the Securitisation of Health and supports the Nuclear Weapons Group. Sarah has a background in student organising, higher education campaigning, and global health research. Her research interests and wider work are focused on addressing state violence and developing an abolitionist public health. Sarah’s poetry collection Fovea / Ages Ago was published by Hajar Press in 2021.
6pm: Keynote lecture
Keynote: African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return | Nana Osei Quarshie, Yale University
Location: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre, 27 Torrington Square London WC1E 7JL
West Africans were far from passive victims of European-imposed psychiatric concepts and institutions. Rather, they enchanted the British colonial asylum in Accra (contemporary Ghana) by accommodating European psychiatric practices principally as experiences within the dynamic tapestry of African ritual and political concerns over territorial control, bodily afflictions, and psychological belonging within families, communities, and states. African people mobilized practices associated by the mid-nineteenth century with healing and harming at shrines of territorial spirits to politically harness the development of psychiatric social control. That is, European psychiatry did not colonize African minds, nor did it displace African psychotherapeutic norms. It was instead built on and grafted onto a repertoire of African healing and harming practices through socio-economic, political, and ritual transactions that, in the case of coastal Ghana, unfolded over the course of centuries.
Bio: Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. An anthropologist and historian by training, Quarshie examines the relationship among mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century.
12pm – Session 3: Reforms, Transformations and Alternate Psychiatries
The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform in the Face of Colonialism and Racism – Tiago Pires Marques Since its conception in the 1970s, the anti-asylum movement and, later, the “Brazilian Psychiatric Reform” (BPR) have aimed to promote social transformations capable of impacting the structural factors of psychological distress. However, the characterisation of these factors has undergone significant changes throughout this period. This presentation analyses these transformations, focusing particularly on how the legacy of colonialism and racism have been conceptualised at different moments. I shall pay special attention to the central position they occupy in the contemporary context of the BPR.
Bio: Associated researcher, Tiago Pires Marques integrates the Research Group Risk(s), Ecologies, Health. He obtained his PhD in History from the European University Institute (2007) with a thesis on the transformations of criminal law under the construction of Fascisms. (See ‘Crime and the Fascist State’, Routledge, 2016). Since 2008, he has studied the developments of psi knowledge (psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis) and the “manufacturing of the psyche”, at the intersection between the history of sciences and the history of religions. Contracted researcher at CES from 2014 to 20124, he developed his socio-historical research on mental health, extending his scope of observation to contemporary times. He is currently investigating the history of mental health models in their relationship with the medicalization of life and the history of human rights. He is especially interested in knowledge, political proposals and alternatives to psychiatry produced by user movements in the field of psychiatry.
Crimes of Peace’: A Preliminary Decolonial Examination of Franco Basaglia’s Thought, Pantxo Ramas This presentation explores Franco Basaglia’s contributions to psychiatric practice and theory in 1960s Trieste, a region shaped by the complexities of the Italian-Yugoslav border in the aftermath of World War II, yet relatively exempt from direct colonial influences. Engaging with key figures in postcolonial and decolonial discourse, particularly Antonio Gramsci, Basaglia’s work invites a deeper analysis of power dynamics within psychiatric practices. After providing an overview of the Trieste experience, the discussion will focus on three critical aspects of Gramscian thought that hold significant relevance for subaltern studies and for Basaglia’s critical psychiatric practice during the 1960s and 1970s: 1) the interplay between ‘autonomy’ and subalternity; 2) Gramsci’s concept of the ‘politics of things’; and 3) the notion of ‘hegemony’ in elucidating the political functions of technical practices within the Italian welfare state of the 1970s. Through this lens, we aim to foster a nuanced understanding of the relevance of critical psychiatric practice in decolonial and postcolonial debates.
Bio:pantxo ramas is a researcher and activist. pantxo’s work focuses on the relation between society and institutions in health, care and culture. pantxo is a member of the militant research collective www.entrarafuera.net and of Conferenza Permanente per la Salute Mentale nel Mondo. Their recent research work on the radical artistic practices of emancipation in the Basaglia’s mental health revolution in Trieste is published on www.palinsestobasagliano.info and has been funded by the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome.
The Chilean Road to Socialism, Psychiatry, and the Omission of Ethnicity and Race, Gabriel Abarca-Brown This presentation is part of the book project tentatively titled Psychiatry and Utopia: From the Road to Socialism to Post-Dictatorial Neoliberal Times (1965-2019). Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, this project delves into the intersections between politics, ideology, radical psychiatry projects, and their afterlives in the recent history of Chile. In this presentation, specifically, I will examine how the Chilean Road to Socialism (1970–73) provided the conditions for the emergence of various revolutionary cultural and scientific projects. In this context, Chilean psychiatrists—along with European scholars and researchers who sought a new Socialism in Latin America—developed multiple community psychiatry initiatives across the country. In this presentation, I will describe how these initiatives shaped a structure-based approach to mental health practice. This approach primarily conceptualized mental health, disorders, and otherness through the category of class (e.g., poverty, social stratification, and socioeconomic inequalities) rather than through other sociocultural categories (e.g., culture, race, ethnicity, and gender, among others). I will argue that the rise of multicultural and intersectional debates on migration has posed challenges to public health services in Chile, particularly regarding the emergence of ethnicity and race as critical factors. I will highlight how discourses related to ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality have intersected with those of class to varying degrees, revealing the influence of history and local context in shaping public health debates and traditions.
Bio: Gabriel Abarca-Brown, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in Medical Humanities at the Center for Culture and the Mind (CULTMIND) at the University of Copenhagen (KU). Gabriel is a medical anthropologist, clinical psychologist, and psychoanalyst. His work focuses on the politics and practices of psychiatry and global mental health and their impacts on subjectivity and everyday life in Latin America. His work has been published in Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry; Medical Anthropology; Social Science & Medicine; Science, Technology & Human Values; BMJ Global Health, and Critical Public Health, among others. He co-edited (with Á. Jiménez-Molina) the book “¿Somos sujetos cerebrales? Neurociencias, Salud Mental y Sociedad” (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2022). Gabriel has been an Advisor to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO). He is also a Co-founder of the Platform for Social Research in Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA).
Roundtable Participants:
Sushrut Jadhav: Prof. Dr Sushrut Jadhav is a street psychiatrist and clinician anthropologist in London, UK. He works as Professor of Cultural Psychiatry, University College London, & Consultant Psychiatrist and Lead Clinician, Camden Homeless Outreach Services for the mentally unwell, Camden & Islington NHS FT. He is also a Lead Clinician for the Cultural Consultation Service, Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. Dr Jadhav is the Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Anthropology and Medicine journal (Taylor & Francis, UK); a Fellow of The Royal Anthropology Institute UK (RAI); and a Member of the RAI Medical Anthropology committee.
Dr Jadhav’s current interests include mental health dimensions of marginal groups, focusing on Caste in India, the homeless-ed in London, Human-Elephant and Human-Monkey relationship in rural and urban India He has taught extensively on medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry programmes at several national and international Universities. Dr Jadhav was an advisor to DSM 5 Task Force for Cultural Formulation.
Ursula Read: Ursula worked as an occupational therapist in NHS mental health services before completing a PhD in anthropology at University College London in 2012. Her doctoral research explored the experiences of people living with severe mental illness and their families in rural Ghana, including use of traditional and faith healers and mental health services.
Ursula uses ethnographic and participatory methods to explore experiences of mental illness and social exclusion and the impact of interventions to expand access to community-based care and promote human rights. Since 2005 she has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ghana, focusing on the impact of mental illness on family life, moral and ethical dilemmas around care and consent, and the relationship between psychiatric services and traditional and faith healers. Her research is also concerned with social and structural determinants of health and inequalities and the potential of community resources such as places of worship for health promotion. She has conducted research in Ghana, the Caribbean and the UK.
Adam Elliot Cooper: Adam Elliott-Cooper received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.
His first monograph, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published by Manchester University Press in May 2021. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021).
Adam sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.