We avoid all arguments over semiology, nosology, or therapeutics. We need hardly say that we are not concerned with producing a scientific work. We shall mention here some Algerian cases which have been attended by us and who seem to us to be particularly eloquent.
Today the war of national liberation which has been carried on by the Algerian people for the last seven years has become a favorable breeding ground for mental disorders, because so far as the Algerians are concerned it is a total war. There is thus during this calm period of successful colonization a regular and important mental pathology which is the direct product of oppression. In the period of colonization when it is not contested by armed resistance, when the sum total of harmful nervous stimuli overstep a certain threshold, the defensive attitudes of the natives give way and they then find themselves crowding the mental hospitals. Railways across the bush, the draining of swamps and a native population which is non-existent politically and economically are in fact one and the same thing. Hostile nature, obstinate and fundamentally rebellious, is in fact represented in the colonies by the bush, by mosquitoes, natives, and fever, and colonization is a success when all this indocile nature has finally been tamed. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. Under the German occupation the French remained men under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. It must in any case be remembered that a colonized people is not only simply a dominated people. This "sensitivity" is easily understood if we simply study and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime. The defensive attitudes created by this violent bringing together of the colonized man and the colonial system form themselves into a structure which then reveals the colonized personality.
We have since 1954 in various scientific works drawn the attention of both French and international psychiatrists to the difficulties that arise when seeking to "cure" a native properly, that is to say, when seeking to make him thoroughly a part of a social background of the colonial type. The truth- is that colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals. We cannot be held responsible that in this war psychiatric phenomena entailing disorders affecting behavior and thought have taken on importance where those who carry out the "pacification" are concerned, or that these same disorders are notable among the "pacified" population. Perhaps these notes on psychiatry will be found ill-timed and singularly out of place in such a book but we can do nothing about that. We shall deal here with the problem of mental disorders which arise from the war of national liberation which the Algerian people are carrying on. That imperialism which today is fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.
Franz fanon excerpts series#
This article is part of a series for World Mental Health Day 2015.
In 'Colonial Violence and Mental Disorders', he discusses the pathologies which result from colonial repression, as well as examinging their violent expression through a shocking case-study: the murder of a child of white European settlers by two of his young Algerian friends. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was a seminal publication, analysing the psychological and psychiatric effects of colonialism upon the colonised subject.
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