This special issue, which brings together six articles, seeks to explore the question of madness from non-European contexts (Latin America and Africa), taking part in the dynamic renewal of historiography on mental disorder and psychiatry in the ‘Global South’ over the past few years.1

The best known historical narrative of the international mental hygiene movement among English-speaking audiences locates its origins in the publication of A Mind That Found Itself, the autobiographical account of Clifford Beers (1876–1943), a Yale graduate and former psychiatric patient. The success of the book is thought to have prompted the creation of the first Society for Mental Hygiene in Connecticut in 1908. Beers’ biography, published as Advocate for the Insane in 1980, contends that mental hygiene abroad developed from seeds first sown in the USA and subsequently in Canada.

This article offers a critical reappraisal of that narrative and advances an alternative framework for understanding the history of the international mental hygiene movement during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on a body of scholarship, emerging since the 1980s, that has sought to decentre the prevailing account, exposing the multiplicity of forces at work in a history that diverges from any straightforward, linear trajectory radiating from a single point of origin.

By tracing this decentred history, the article highlights the contested nature of the ‘international’ in the context of the mental hygiene movement. Case studies from the USA, France, Brazil, and Argentina reveal both the conflicts it engendered and the diverse meanings and significance it assumed within distinct national settings.

Examining the systemic exploitation of mentally ill individuals, this study focuses on the practices of the British colonial administration in Kabba Province, Northern Nigeria (1900–1947). This research investigates how colonial authorities employed biopolitical strategies to categorise, control, and exploit this vulnerable population for labour, prioritising colonial economic and administrative interests. The study utilises a qualitative methodology, primarily analysing archival documents from the National Archives of Nigeria (NAK), Kaduna, and Arewa House Archives (AHA), to uncover the forced labour system’s practices and rationalisations. Crucially, it incorporates oral sources from direct descendants of ethno-medical practitioners, former colonial staff, traditional chiefs, and learned community members. This oral history component provides vital intergenerational knowledge, contextualising archival findings and offering perspectives often absent from official records, ensuring a nuanced understanding of pre-colonial mental health practices and colonial-era lived experiences. Secondary literature on colonial biopower, mental health history, and regional history provides a comparative framework. Findings indicate the colonial administration systematically repurposed traditional care and established new mechanisms to identify, isolate, and compel mentally ill individuals into various forms of forced labour for infrastructure and economic extraction. In conclusion, this research significantly contributes to scholarship on vulnerable populations during colonialism, illuminating the intricate link between mental illness, labour, and power in colonial Nigeria, and informing contemporary debates on mental health, human rights, and historical justice.

This article analyzes the medicalisation strategies deployed by Peruvian alienists in the daily life of the Lima Asylum during the last third of the 19th century. Special attention is given to the process of hospitalisation of the insane in the psychiatric hospital, since this administrative procedure reveals the dialogue, confrontation, and negotiation between the asylum staff and the state and social bodies in the public management of insanity. Through the support of the civil authorities in charge of the psychiatric hospital administration, we argued that the local alienists sought to impose medical knowledge in the asylum space as the legitimate criterion for the confinement of the insane in Peru. This process was not without tensions, setbacks, and disputes, especially with the families and the state agencies of control and social defence seeking to preserve their former prerogatives over the fate of their insane. However, we propose that these medicalisation strategies promoted by the alienists in the daily space of the Lima Asylum managed to situate psychiatric care as a state problem and these actors as experts in the public management of insanity.

This article is an attempt to reconstruct the history of the first Nigerien psychiatric service, and diverse aspects of the ordinary functioning of Pavillon E in Niamey (Niger): the organisation of daily life, the position occupied by coopérant doctors, the precise perimeter and development of practices taken from social and community psychiatry, and relationships with the outside world (families, police, legal system, the public health office).

This research allows us to rehistoricise and refine the details of a period from 1950 to 1980 which, up until now, was viewed as fixed and anachronistic. We draw on precious sources of empirical data – medical and administrative archives, students’ dissertations, oral sources – which invite us to reconsider both colonial/post-colonial (dis)continuities and the temporal caesuras in the literature or in reports from the time.

This landscape of mental healthcare appears to be more or less deeply affected by regional and international dynamics, such as the French coopération system, the networks of ethnopsychiatry and transcultural psychiatry, or the network of pharmaceutical groups and their subsidiaries.

Studying this service also raises the issues of the chronology and daily life of post-independence psychiatric care in francophone West Africa. Finally, our research interrogates the intellectual partitions between reforming disalienist movements and day-to-day psychiatry, and addresses fundamental epistemological questions on how historiography can restore the balance of knowledge between them.

The Pinel Sanatorium, the brainchild of Doctor Antonio Carlos Pacheco e Silva, a leading figure in Brazilian psychiatry, was inaugurated in 1929 in São Paulo as a private institution. It operated until 1944, during which time it recorded approximately 4,500 hospitalisations. In 30 psychiatric records, in addition to the usual clinical records, such as the Psychiatric Examination – in which the doctor records the elements he deems essential for identifying the mental illness from different sources of information, such as those provided by family members – attachments were found containing letters and short texts written by the inpatients. Addressed to different people, these letters, which were retained and evaluated by the doctors, played a central role in assessing the psychiatric conditions of the inmates. However, by being considered historical sources that reveal the ‘point of view’ of the mad, these documents are fundamental to the development of innovative approaches in the field of the history of madness and psychiatry. Based on the articulation between the context in which these records were produced, the social markers of difference that constitute the subjects, as well as the emotions expressed by the people who wrote them, the article sets out to answer two questions: (1) How the emotions expressed – both by the inmates and by their loved ones – were interpreted by psychiatrists and used to formulate diagnoses, and to define treatments and prognoses; (2) What meanings these emotions took on for the inmates themselves, in other words, how they put their experiences and subjectivities on display.

This paper examines letters from the casebooks of the Valkenberg Lunatic Asylum in the Cape Colony during the South African War. Valkenberg was opened in 1891 in Cape Town, and was the only asylum established exclusively for white patients in the Cape. The South African War took place between 1899 and 1902, and several soldiers serving in the War were treated at Valkenberg during this period. The letters were written by a male patient who used bureaucratic and legal channels to claim his sanity and secure release from the asylum, showcasing a rare example from the archive of a patient’s voice as well as a view into the inner workings of a colonial asylum in South Africa. These letters allow a view into the personal lives of patients and attendants, the medical rules doctors followed, and instances of racism, unexpected solidarity, and loneliness. Analysing these letters reveals the changes taking place in a turbulent South Africa, including the tensions and conflicts of a country at war, the racism and nationalism of early twentieth-century South Africa, and the violence present within the asylum network. By examining letters written directly by a patient, which give voice to a perspective that official institutional records would not ordinarily allow, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on patient voices in the history of psychiatry.