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Thesis ID: CBB001561785

“Dis-Ordered” States: Views about Mental Disorder and the Management of the Mad in South Africa, 1939--1989 (2005)

Queen's University at Kingston
Jeeves, Alan
Publication date: 2005
Language: English

Publication Date: 2005
Edition Details: Advisor: Jeeves, Alan
Physical Details: 313 pp.

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Medical abuse Mental disorders and diseases Science and government Psychiatry Human rights 20th century South Africa

In the late 1970s, South African mental institutions were plagued with scandals about human rights abuse, and psychiatric practitioners were accused of being tools of the apartheid state. Indeed, between 1939 and 1989, some psychiatric practitioners supported the mandate of the racist and heteropatriarchal government and most mental patients were treated abysmally. However, critics of South Africa's mental health system fail to recognise its multifarious and contradictory nature. Nor do they appreciate the complex position of those within it. While not contesting the belief that human rights abuses occurred within South Africa's mental health system, I argue that the disparity among practitioners and the fluidity of their beliefs, along with the disjointed mental health infrastructure, not only enabled the diffusion of state control, but also permitted practitioners to concurrently adopt ideas that were contradictory to each other--ideas that may have supported and/or challenged apartheid ideologies. Patients were also, to a limited extent, able to challenge the constraints of their institutionalization. Unlike studies worldwide that show that women were institutionalized in far higher numbers than heterosexual men, in South Africa, per capita, white males made up the majority of patients in institutions. At the end of the second World War, South African practitioners, influenced by international trends, began advancing new therapeutic options to patients. State mental health policies, however, were ad-hoc and ineffective, and only those whites who were seen more crucial to the apartheid project, or those that were deemed more dangerous to society, were institutionalized. Treatment focused on white men, and state mental institutions and those working within them never became effective disposal mechanisms for the state. Even those private long-term care facilities to which the government contracted the care of black patients in the 1960s held a more complex role than their critics have suggested.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/02 (2005): 719. UMI pub. no. NQ99812.

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