Book contents
- Mandatory Madness
- The Global Middle East
- Mandatory Madness
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 3 Petitions, Families, and Pathways to the Asylum
- 4 Insanity before the Courts
- 5 Getting In and Getting Out of the Criminal Lunatic Section
- Part III
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Insanity before the Courts
Defining Abnormality, Punishing Normalcy
from Part II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2023
- Mandatory Madness
- The Global Middle East
- Mandatory Madness
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I
- Part II
- 3 Petitions, Families, and Pathways to the Asylum
- 4 Insanity before the Courts
- 5 Getting In and Getting Out of the Criminal Lunatic Section
- Part III
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines encounters around mental health 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 health 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.
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- Mandatory MadnessColonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine, pp. 158 - 193Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023