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A Prescription for Violence: The Legacy of Colonization in Contemporary Forensic Mental Health and the Production of Difference

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“All that the native has seen in his country is that they can freely arrest him, beat him, starve him: and no professor of ethics, no priest has ever come to be beaten in his place, nor to share their bread with him” (Fanon 1965, p. 44).

Abstract

In this paper I will argue, through the example of the “treatment” of racialized minorities diagnosed with mental illness, that the mental health system (including its unique laws, production of different identity categories and ruling disciplines), with its dogmatic adherence to and reliance on alleged expert opinion and internal inquiry, allows for the erasure of subaltern voices. Often we hear about a tragic incident as reported by the media about someone diagnosed with a mental illness who has committed a crime. These representations routinely present the person as violent, aggressive, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Repeatedly the voice of the accused is not represented; his or her social, historical, and political contexts are not considered relevant. The technologies of the criminal justice and mental health system’s use of physical or chemical restraint, coercive treatment, or practices such as deportation are also not reported, thus reproducing systems of harm. We don’t get to look inside the asylum. Patients’ voices are excluded from the discursive practices, disciplinary hegemony or dominant regimes of truth within the mental health system. This creates a system impermeable to criticism, where violence continues to prevail. Through a discussion of the disproportionate criminalization and deportation of the mentally ill, the false associations between mental illness and violence, the colonial ancestry of internal inquiry, and example cases from the media, this paper reviews how these particular technologies of violence owe their inheritance to the orientalising, discursive practices and disciplinary hegemony developed during colonization that when ignored, reproduce the dehumanizing outcomes upon which they were built.

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Notes

  1. The overall hegemony of biomedical psychiatry is said here to be highly problematic. The primary documents of authority for the psychiatric field include the DSM-IV (soon the DSM V) and the ICD 10. These diagnostic authoritative texts are applied to policy, law and practice in the U.K. the U.S. and Canada. Although some jurisdictional issues and differences do exist across these systems, in this paper I direct our attention to the common aspects of identification, classification, dehumanization and maltreatment that are inherent across jurisdictions.

  2. Not mutually exclusive nor homogeneous categories or referenced in any particular order.

  3. “First Nations” referring to aboriginal people in Canada of status or non-status. The term often used instead of “Indian”. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. (2012-10-01), Retrieved on June 11, 2013 from http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100014642/1100100014643.

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  1. School of Social Work, York University, 4 Follis Ave. Mainfloor, Toronto, ON, M6G1S3, Canada

    Ameil J. Joseph

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Joseph, A.J. A Prescription for Violence: The Legacy of Colonization in Contemporary Forensic Mental Health and the Production of Difference. Crit Crim 22, 273–292 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9208-1

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