Mandatory Madness: Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine by Chris Sandal Wilson - Historical Study of Mental Healthcare in Middle East for Scholars & Researchers" （注：原标题已是英文且学术性较强，主要优化是： 1. 保持了核心关键词"Colonial Psychiatry", "Mental Illness", "British Mandate Palestine" 2. 增加了内容定位说明"Historical Study of Mental Healthcare" 3. 补充了受众群体"for Scholars & Researchers" 4. 添加了地理相关词"Middle East"提升SEO）

Mandatory Madness offers a 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 an eclectic mix of archival and published material, Mandatory Madness reveals how a range of actors - British colonial officials, Zionist health workers, Arab doctors and nurses, and Palestinian families - 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: not only in underfunded and overcrowded government mental hospitals and private Jewish clinics, certainly, but also in family homes and neighbourhood streets, in colonial courtrooms and prisons and census offices, and in the itineraries of shaykhs and patients alike as they crossed newly drawn borders within the Levant.

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.

Chris Sandal-Wilson is a Lecturer in Medical History at the University of Exeter. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge and was previously a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.

2025

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