In the decades following World War II employment, education, and mobility increased among Pacific peoples. During this period the numbers deemed by their communities and state authorities to be suffering from mental illness very gradually increased. This article examines how these patterns related to the piecemeal development of mental health infrastructure and emergent professionalisation within mental health services in the decades after World War II but before independence within many Pacific countries. In order to provide an overview of postwar mental health infrastructure in the Pacific, I trace some of the earlier infrastructure; second, I explore how the ‘Big 3‘ in 1960s Pacific psychiatry, Dr Duncan Macgregor, Dr B. G. Burton-Bradley, and Dr Georges Zeldine, linked growing mental illness with changing labour and social patterns; and third, discuss some of the magic bullets (drug and shock therapies) that were fired by expatriate professionals to treat mental illness and restore mental health within their other frameworks of deinstitutionalisation, transcultural psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry. The article concludes by overviewing Indigenous input in mental health infrastructure during the years after World War II and with decolonisation in the Pacific. Change, if at all, came much later and Pacific ways of doing mental wellness persisted alongside and/or were entangled with the magic bullets of biomedicine.
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