Mandatory Madness closes with an epilogue, focussed squarely on 1948, which marked the end of the British mandate, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the Palestinian nakba or catastrophe. By reconstructing a series of psychiatric encounters, which attended the end of the mandate period, the epilogue draws out the profound and violent rupture of this moment, as well as the longer processes of partition, erasure, and pathologisation which surrounded it. While the epilogue traces some of these processes into the post-1948 period, it ultimately concludes that this rupture radically diminishes the possibilities for continuing any unitary, entangled history of psychiatry within the territory of what had once been mandate Palestine.

This chapter focuses on the final decade of the mandate period, which was marked by notable investment in both psychiatric institutions and expertise. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and with partition on the horizon, this chapter traces two developments in particular: the opening of the third and final government mental hospital at Jaffa in 1944, and the cultivation of expertise within the department of health around wartime trauma and mental nursing. Far from reflecting any new vision for colonial development on the part of the mandate government, a closer look at each of these developments reveals that investment was driven as much by colonial subjects and crisis as by British design, and built figuratively and literally on the foundations of the past.

This chapter examines encounters around mental illness that played out within mandate Palestine’s hybrid legal system. Issues of mental competency and legal responsibility were debated across civil and religious courts, but this chapter focuses on the criminal courtroom and criminal insanity defences. Criminal insanity defences forced mandate judges, medical experts, and lay witnesses to debate what forms of behaviour and thought were evidence of mental illness, and what should, by contrast, be considered normal, ‘rational’, and therefore punishable for a given defendant. Through a close reading of two exemplary cases, this chapter moves beyond the historiography’s focus on cultural difference to highlight how different bodies of knowledge – psychiatric, social, and folkloric – were put to work to define the ‘normal’ in relation to other axes of identity like age, class, and gender. A third case, which played out against the backdrop of the Palestinian great revolt, meanwhile reveals how understandings of the ‘normal’ could be warped by wider political circumstances, with life-or-death consequences for defendants.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

This chapter takes us to the start of the 1930s, to explore the colonial production of knowledge on mental illness in mandate Palestine. It does so not through the writings of any psychiatric expert, but rather the report on the 1931 census and its extensive analysis of the return of the ‘insane’ population. Rooted in a very particular encounter around mental illness – between enumerator and enumerated – the census report’s analysis, and the debates surrounding it, reveals how the question of mental illness could be used to locate both Palestine, and its different communities, in relation to empire, development, and modernity. This chapter eschews the usual focus on identity in relation to the colonial census to instead foreground translation: from myriad terms in multiple languages to the single term – ‘insanity’ – adopted by the report; from the often messy testimonies of the enumerated to the record of the enumerator; and from encounter into theory.

This chapter focuses on the hundreds of so-called criminal lunatics who appeared to slip between the gaps in psychiatric provision over the 1940s and ended up in the lunatic sections of the mandate’s prisons. Their abandonment, this chapter argues, was the product of often- fraught negotiations across state and society: mandate officials in particular worried that the families of the mentally ill were staging minor criminal offences in order to have their relatives bypass long waiting lists and access institutional provision. Through a careful reading of case files from the rich archive of the criminal lunatic section at Acre, this chapter delves into the complex dynamics that surrounded these individuals’ routes into – as well as out of – this institutional site. These stories reveal that neither insanity nor criminality was a stable category in mandate Palestine. But the case files, particularly the ‘delusions’ they record, also hold out the possibility of recovering the experiences and perspectives of those deemed criminally insane, and indeed their capacity to exercise a degree of agency over their lives.

This chapter centres the encounter between patient and psychiatrist, and between mandate Palestine and new methods of psychiatric treatment being developed around the world in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, it focuses on three distinct methods of treatment: patient work or occupational therapy; insulin- and cardiazol-shock therapies; and electro-convulsive therapy. All in different ways sought to work (on) the body to cure the mind, and were introduced into private and government mental institutions in mandate Palestine in the decade before 1948. Though these techniques tantalised with the promise of transcending context through their universal applicability, this chapter highlights instead how these psychiatric techniques travelled to and were deployed within Palestine in a highly uneven way, and attempts to piece together some sense of how patients and their families responded to and understood these treatments as well.

This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.