Chapter 1: The Age of Enlightenment: The Roots of Racism in Psychiatry

In this chapter, I provide an analysis of how ideologies about race, gender, and other identities helped to inform psychiatric discourse during the colonial era in Canada, the UK, and the USA. This chapter provides an analysis of racism in psychiatry, using anti-colonial theory to interrogate psychiatric imperialism and how this shapes psychiatry and other mental health professions today. The scientific techniques that were developed at this time to demonstrate the pathological inferiority of Black people showed, to the astonishment of many, that African and Indigenous Peoples had lower rates of mental illness than White Americans. Initially, this was surprising to members of the psychiatric establishment, whose reliance on mental health theories of moral degeneracy assumed higher rates of mental illness in Africans. Consequently, the source of ‘madness’ was redefined, so the focus was no longer on the moral degeneracy of Black people but on evolutionary complexity and the perceived deficiencies of African culture. It was a theory that sought to characterise mental illness as a product of a sophisticated society and to confirm the superiority of the White race. In the following section, I discuss how ideologies about power, knowledge, language, and discourse help to position psychiatry as an authoritative and dominant force globally.