Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda

Pringle, Yolana

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-60095-0

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…I am not a historian and my own material on the history of psychiatry is comparatively limited. Thus, the aim of this article is not to give a detailed account of the complex history of Ugandan psychiatry (for a thorough historical analysis which complements this article in important ways, see Pringle, 2013Pringle, , 2019 but to present an as yet untold story that conveys a unique image of African psychiatry and its central actors. It is important to bear in mind that interviews are always, to some extent, staged performances in which interviewees offer selective, subjective views and present themselves in a particular, sometimes heroic, light.…”

Section: A Note On Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, there have been a number of important publications on colonial and post-colonial psychiatry in Africa (e.g., Bullard, 2005Bullard, , 2007Bell, 1991;Heaton, 2013;Jackson, 2005;Keller, 2007;Mahone, 2006Mahone, , 2007McCulloch, 1995;Parle, 2007;Pringle, 2013Pringle, , 2019Sadowsky, 1999). Hardly any work, however, addresses nursing (for a rare exception, see Marks, 2007).…”

Section: The History Of Psychiatry In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 Certainly, her portrayal has its blind spots: while she hints at shortages of staff, food, and other essential resources at different parts of the interview, the challenges that she and her colleagues must have faced throughout much of Butabika's history were probably far greater than she mentions (cf. Pringle, 2019).…”

Section: Images Of African Psychiatric Hospitalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A pioneer of psy: The first Ugandan psychiatric nurse and her (different) tale of psychiatry in Uganda

Vorhölter

2020

Transcult Psychiatry

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In Africa, the emergence of a “modern” mental health regime centered on psychiatry is often portrayed as a unidirectional intervention by “the West.” Analyses ranging from medical histories of colonial psychiatry to more recent studies of Global Mental Health focus mostly on the role of external actors and the ways their actions impact(ed) on local populations. Uncritical studies simply reduce the complexity of African therapeutic landscapes to a “treatment gap” and see the introduction of “science-based” mental health approaches as necessary “civilizing” missions. Critical studies emphasize the harms of psychiatric interventions and celebrate local healing practices instead. Both approaches are problematic: they ignore the many interconnections between highly dynamic treatment regimes that cannot be neatly designated as African or western, portray local populations as largely passive, and neglect the multiple ways in which psychiatry has been embraced, adapted, and disrupted by Africans themselves. This article challenges simplistic depictions of “western” psychiatry in Africa by providing a portrait of Rwashana Selina, the first Ugandan psychiatric nurse who—after being sent to the UK in the 1950s for training—became a central figure in Ugandan psychiatry. Based on interview material, I recount her life story and discuss her formative role in the development of psychiatric care in the colonial and postcolonial era. Rwashana's tale of Ugandan psychiatry emphasizes co-operation, mutual acknowledgments and pluralistic leadership and thus breaks with typical images of and dichotomies between white doctors and supposedly inferior African medical staff.

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Section: A Note On Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The History Of Psychiatry In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Images Of African Psychiatric Hospitalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A pioneer of psy: The first Ugandan psychiatric nurse and her (different) tale of psychiatry in Uganda

Vorhölter

2020

Transcult Psychiatry

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“…This fundamental difference shaped their experiences and broader professional roles and outlook. Of course, as we will see below, none of the ‘non-Western’ protagonists of this story was so in any absolute way: most professionals from Eastern Europe or the decolonising world either received part of their education in Western Europe, or became permanently involved in ‘Western’ organisations and structures of power (Pringle 2019 ). The very instability of their position and cultural and professional belonging—their capacity for complex crossovers—fundamentally contributed to the innovative and critical nature of their interventions, as will become clear in the rest of the article.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference, Universalism and Social Psychiatry in the Age of Decolonisation

Antić

2021

Cult Med Psychiatry

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In the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of WWII and the Nazi atrocities and in the midst of decolonisation, a new discipline of transcultural psychiatry was being established and institutionalised. This was part and parcel of a global political project in the course of which Western psychiatry attempted to leave behind its colonial legacies and entanglements, and lay the foundation for a more inclusive, egalitarian communication between Western and non-Western concepts of mental illness and healing. In this period, the infrastructure of post-colonial global and transcultural psychiatry was set up, and leading psychiatric figures across the world embarked on identifying, debating and sometimes critiquing the universal psychological characteristics and psychopathological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures and civilisations. The article will explore how this psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’ was influenced and shaped by the concurrent global rise of social psychiatry. In the early phases of transcultural psychiatry, a large number of psychiatrists were very keen to determine how cultural and social environments shaped the basic traits of human psychology, and ‘psy’ practitioners and anthropologist from all over the world sought to re-define the relationship between culture, race and individual psyche. Most of them worked within the universalist framework, which posited that cultural differences merely formed a veneer of symptoms and expressions while the universal core of mental illness remained the same across all cultures. The article will argue that, even in this context, which explicitly challenged the hierarchical and racist paradigms of colonial psychiatry, the founding generations of transcultural psychiatrists from Western Europe and North America tended to conceive of broader environmental determinants of mental health and pathology in the decolonising world in fairly reductionist terms—focusing almost exclusively on ‘cultural difference’ and cultural, racial and ethnic ‘traditions’, essentialising and reifying them in the process, and failing to establish some common sociological or economic categories of analysis of Western and non-Western ‘mentalities’. On the other hand, it was African and Asian psychiatrists as well as Marxist psychiatrists from Eastern Europe who insisted on applying those broader social psychiatry concepts—such as social class, occupation, socio-economic change, political and group pressures and relations etc.—which were quickly becoming central to mental health research in the West but were largely missing from Western psychiatrists’ engagement with the decolonising world. In this way, some of the leading non-Western psychiatrists relied on social psychiatry to establish the limits of psychiatric universalism, and challenge some of its Eurocentric and essentialising tendencies. Even though they still subscribed to the predominant universalist framework, these practitioners invoked social psychiatry to draw attention to universalism’s internal incoherence, and sought to revise the lingering evolutionary thinking in transcultural psychiatry. They also contributed to re-imagining cross-cultural encounters and exchanges as potentially creative and progressive (whereas early Western transcultural psychiatry primarily viewed the cross-cultural through the prism of pathogenic and traumatic ‘cultural clash’). Therefore, the article will explore the complex politics of the shifting and overlapping definitions of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ factors in mid-twentieth century transcultural psychiatry, and aims to recover the revolutionary voices of non-Western psychiatrists and their contributions to the global re-drawing of the boundaries of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century.

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“…According to the PARI model, all of these perceptions and responses can be affected by context factors such as cultural and political conditions, collective and historical representations, media and public discourse, or individualistic versus collectivistic orientations. For instance, collective representations of political violence and persecution in a receiving country can serve as comparison standards for judging of perils experienced by refugees (Pringle, 2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

Ugandan and British individuals' views of refugees in their countries: An exploratory mixed‐methods comparison

Hellmann

Übergünne-Otte

Heimlich

et al. 2021

Community & Applied Soc Psy

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Using an exploratory mixed‐methods approach, we examined thoughts concerning refugees reported by participants from a non‐Western country, Uganda, and the United Kingdom (total N = 113). We explored whether, due to various sociocultural, political and geographic differences, critical features of refugee migration (e.g., migration forcedness and migration‐related perils) would be viewed differently by Ugandan and UK participants. An inductive qualitative content analysis of responses in an online survey yielded 11 categories with 40 subcategories revealing several similarities between Ugandan and UK participants. For instance, similar proportions of participants from both countries acknowledged refugees' suffering before their migration and the forced nature of refugees' migration. However, we also found that more British than Ugandan participants referred to perils refugees suffer during their journeys, possibly resulting from differences in refugees' migration routes (e.g., crossing other countries, travelling by dilapidated boats, migration duration). Furthermore, Ugandan but not British participants took pride in international praise their country received for its forthcoming treatment of refugees. There were no differences regarding the extent to which Ugandan and British individuals exhibited prejudice towards refugees or experienced threats from refugees. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for refugee integration.

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Psychiatry and Decolonisation in Uganda

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

A pioneer of psy: The first Ugandan psychiatric nurse and her (different) tale of psychiatry in Uganda

A pioneer of psy: The first Ugandan psychiatric nurse and her (different) tale of psychiatry in Uganda

Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference, Universalism and Social Psychiatry in the Age of Decolonisation

Ugandan and British individuals' views of refugees in their countries: An exploratory mixed‐methods comparison

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