Angela McCarthy - Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840-2010

1 The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe
Edited by Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron

2. The Insanity of Place/ The Place of Insanity
Essays on the History of Psychiatry
Andrew Scull

3 Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship
Sites of Production
Edited by Tina Mai Chen and David S. Churchill

4 Genre and Cinema
Ireland and Transnationalism
Edited by Brian McIlroy

5 Histories of Postmodernism
Edited by Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing

6 Africa after Modernism
Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy
Michael Janis

7 Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics
C. L. R. James Critique of Modernity
Brett St Louis

8 Making British Culture
English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 17401830
David Allan

9 Empires and Boundaries
Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings
Edited by Harald Fischer-Tin and Susanne Gehrmann

10 Tobacco in Russian History and Culture
From the Seventeenth Century to the Present
Edited by Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks

11 History of Islam in German Thought
From Leibniz to Nietzsche
Ian Almond

12 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World
Edited by Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller

13 History of Participatory Media
Politics and Publics, 17502000
Edited by Anders Ekstrm Solveig Jlich, Frans Lundgren and Per Wisselgren

14 Living in the City
Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 12002010
Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems

15 Historical Disasters in Context
Science, Religion, and Politics
Edited by Andrea Janku, Gerrit J. Schenk and Franz Mauelshagen

16 Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health
International Perspectives, 18402010
Edited by Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne

First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global.

Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Migration, ethnicity, and mental health : international perspectives, 1840-2010 / edited by Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne.
p. cm. (Routledge studies in cultural history ; 16)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. ImmigrantsMental healthHistory19th century. 2. ImmigrantsMental healthHistory20th century. I. McCarthy, Angela, 1971 II. Coleborne, Catharine.
RC451.4.E45M535 2011
362.196890086912dc23
2011033403

ISBN: 978-0-415-89580-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-12843-5 (ebk)

This collection stems from International Perspectives on Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health, an international symposium held at the University of Otago in April 2010. We are grateful to all our contributors and the audience for their enthusiasm, interest, and enlightening discussions during this event and for their patience as we brought the edited volume to fruition. We would like especially to thank the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund for funding our project Migration, ethnicity and insanity in New Zealand and Australia, 18601910 (08-UOO-167 SOC). For the provision of symposium funding we are grateful to the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies and the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago. The event was held at the Hocken Collections, and we are very grateful to the staff there for their assistance, especially Sharon Dell and Anne Jackman.

Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne

Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne

Until fairly recently, international scholars working in the field of the histories of mental health have privileged national episodes and sites in the histories of institutions and institutional confinement, particularly through the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century eras, with some work focused on the twentieth century.

Yet despite the new and developing attention to looking across sites at similar and divergent practices and at shared knowledges of mental health, the subject of migration has received far less specific attention than these other strands of inquiry outlined above. There have been exceptions, specifically those contributed by American historians and studies. Richard W. Fox, for instance, used a sample of 1,229 case histories in his book So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 18701930 (1979) to identify, inter alia, the social backgrounds and behaviour of the insane. His methodology and analysis are therefore important to us, particularly his stress on age as a factor in explaining the over-representation of the foreign-born among the insane. Yet inside existing studies of Britain, and the white settler colonies we includeCanada, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, as well as numerous studies of Indiaimmigrants themselves mostly appear in the discussion as subject to colonial economies, or as at risk populations because they allegedly lacked familial networks and were often among the very poor. The social and geographical origins of patients at specific institutions also receive some attention, as does their ethnicity, an important aspect of this volume, as we discuss below.