Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.? Choice
Claire Edington''s fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the ea
Trade Review
This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.
* Choice *
Beyond the Asylum is a brilliant piece of research, draw[ing] on extensive work in Vietnamese, French, and Cambodian archives. When combined with her gifted prose, Edington's meticulous research comes alive, giving the reader a sense of meeting some of the patients, doctors, and families that she discusses.
* American Historical Review *
Edington's account is distinguished by the way she escapes the confines of the asylum—and a certain kind of postcolonial scholarship—and instead uses the history of psychiatry and mental illness as a means to explore the wider dynamics of colonial rule. In so doing, she engages with important debates across a range of fields, most notably the history of medicine, the history of imperialism, and Vietnamese studies
* Pacific Affairs *
The author includes a lot of comment on the sociological impetuses and impacts of such problems and discusses the reasons behind the developments which took place, in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century in Vietnam, to cope with the rise of understanding of the problems of mental health.
* Asian Affairs *
[T]his is an admirable and valuable publication. The work provides a much needed study of the colonial asylum and modern psychiatry's interaction with Vietnamese society. The author's argument is convincing, research robust, and writing flawless.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Writing the Social History of Psychiatry in French Colonial Vietnam
1. A Background to Confinement: The Legal Category of the "Insane" Person in French Indochina
2. Patients, Staff, and the Everyday Challenges of Asylum Administration
3. Labor as Therapy: Agricultural Colonies, Study Trips, and the Psychiatric Reeducation of the Insane
4. Going In and Getting Out of the Colonial Asylum: Families and the Politics of Caregiving
5. Mental illness and Treatment Advice in the Vietnamese Popular Press
6. Psychiatric Expertise and Indochina's Crime Problem
Conclusion: Continuities and Change in Postcolonial Vietnam
Notes
Bibliography
Index
