As superintendent at the largest psychiatric hospital in Algeria, Blida-Joinville, Fanon was concerned with the problems of administration that hampered the running of the service. In the article ‘Aspects of Mental Health in Algeria’, he evaluates the then current provision of psychiatric care. The tone of the article is restrained, as one would expect, given Fanon's position at the time and the group authorship of the piece. Even so, it contains a number of weighty recommendations for changes to existing services.

‘Mental Health’ deals with the organisation of the existing service with its massive shortcomings and with those problems found at Blida-Joinville which were peculiar to the Algerian context. The object of the article was to show the ways in which the service needed to change in order to provide efficient assistance. Ironically the article contains complimentary references to Professor Porot, Head of the School of Psychiatry at the University of Algiers, and Dr Sutter. Porot had been the first to demand and secure the recruitment of medical officers from metropolitan France, thereby creating the first effective psychiatric service. Porot also achieved the provision of more beds and instituted the establishment of psychiatric hospitals at Oran and Constantine.

When the contemporary system was analysed in terms of the arrival, treatment, and departure of patients, the limitations of the administration were obvious. Admissions occurred only when beds became vacant. Overcrowding was exacerbated by the fact that Blida received those patients who had failed to respond to therapy at the other centres.