Italian colonial psychiatry: outlines of a discipline, and practical achievements in Libya and the Horn of Africa

'Psychosis of civilization': a colonial-situated diagnosis

In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis 'psychosis of civilization' appeared in some psychiatrists' writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming 'like' Europeans - a goal to which they seem to aspire - but too far from their 'ancestral habits' to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

The political use of psychiatry: A comparison between totalitarian regimes

BACKGROUND

After the end of Second World War, the recent experience of the Nazi horrors stimulated a debate about the political use of psychiatry. Over the years, the focus shifted on major dictatorships of the time and especially on Soviet Union.

AIMS

This article aims to provide a critical review of the ways in which psychiatry was used by totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

METHODS

We summarized relevant literature about political use of psychiatry in totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, with particular focus on Fascism, Nazism, Argentina dictatorship, Soviet Union and China.

RESULTS

One of the features that are common to most of the dictatorships is that the use of psychiatry has become more prominent when the regimes have had the need to make more acceptable the imprisonment of enemies in the eyes of the world. This for example happened in the Nazi regime when sterilization and killing of psychiatric patients was explained as a kind of euthanasia, or in the Soviet Union after the formal closure of the corrective labor camps and the slow resumption of relations with the capitalistic world, or in China to justify persecution of religious minorities and preserve economic relations with Western countries.

CONCLUSION

Psychiatry has been variously used by totalitarian regimes as a means of political persecution and especially when it was necessary to make acceptable to public opinion the imprisonment of political opponents.