Article ID: CBB504336419

Infrastructure and ‘Magic Bullets’ in Mental Health in the Colonial Pacific (2021)

unapi

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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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB504336419/

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Authors & Contributors
Pringle, Yolana
Doyle, Aunty Kerrie
Daker, Mauricio V.
Lin, Zhuyun
Street, Alice
Sale, Kayla
Concepts
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatry
Biomedicine
Health care
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Medicine and politics
Time Periods
20th century, late
19th century
21st century
20th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
China
Papua New Guinea
Uganda
Nigeria
Hawaii (U.S.)
Spain
Institutions
World Health Organization (WHO)
National Institute of Health (U.S.)
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