On Beyond the Asylum

This is a really interesting book on the mutually-reinforcing relationship between colonialism and mental health treatment in French Indochina. I think one of the most striking things about studying French colonial history is the prominence that the asylum has in the field. This is largely due to two individuals: Aimé Césaire offered a lot of commentary on the asylum, and Franz Fanon was a psychiatrist in Algeria and he argued that colonialism had notable psychological effects on colonized populations. I do think interest in the asylum was exacerbated by Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, as he offers another framework for thinking about it. That said, the vast majority of the work on colonial mental health has been relegated to studies of North Africa—especially Algeria but, to lesser extent, Tunisia.

In fact, Edington’s book is the first that I’ve seen that is explicitly a study of the asylum (and its milieu) in French Southeast Asia. What makes Edington’s book so important is the way that she moves beyond the physical structure of the asylum and events within its interior to making sense of the asylum’s place in larger Vietnamese social life. This is critical, as few patients who were checked in to asylums spent their entire lives there. Instead, they would arrive—often forcibly—and depart at different points depending on various circumstances, and the asylum would remain present in the minds of these Vietnamese individuals. Yet, French psychiatrists and colonial officials had difficulties building a logic around who would enter the facility and who would leave—there was no easy definition to classify someone as “mentally ill.” Nevertheless, they did come to believe that mental illness was a source of criminality and, as a result, juvenile delinquents would often be forced into these facilities although they had no signs of any “abnormality” (which is, as Foucault argues, a construction of its own). As a result, the asylum was fundamentally a way for French officials to exert control over the Vietnamese population, especially with regard to policing.

That said, Vietnamese people were hardly passive in their treatment by the French. Much ink has already been spilled on the increasing role of anticolonialism, nationalism, and anti-French organization during this time period, but patients (and their families) also played an active role in the process. Frequently, families would plead to the French so their loved ones would stay out of the asylum. Once inside, families often petitioned administrators to release their kin as soon as possible. Less commonly, families would actually attempt to convince the French to bring their family members to the asylum.

All together, Edington’s book is an excellent window into the technologies of colonial rule and the history of psychiatry in colonial Southeast Asia. More importantly, these subjects do not exist on their own, and Edington grounds them deeply in transformations that were taking place in parallel.

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