States of Mind: Searching for Mental Health in Natal and Zululand, 1868-1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this excellent, important history of colonial mental health, Julie Parle advances several key ideas about the study of colonial psychiatry. First, Western psychiatry's reach was tentative in Natal and Zululand in the period she studies. ‘Colonial psychiatry’, she writes, ‘was of limited significance’ (p. 7). Focused on areas of southern Africa that have so far escaped attention, in part due to the relative lack of extant institutional records, Parle's study therefore illuminates the world beyond the asylum in interesting ways. Second, then, is Parle's contention that a range of treatments and approaches to mental health on offer in this part of the world highlight the theme of medical pluralism. Although her history bears a strong relationship to the ongoing work in the field of colonial psychiatry, one that is nicely articulated by Parle in her Introduction, this study also opens up new lines of inquiry. Colonial psychiatry might need redefinition, and new scholarly approaches. The populations of the ‘mad’ located by Parle are quintessentially ‘colonial’: a mix of ethnic groups, some displaced indigenous peoples, Europeans and migrants from other parts looking for work. In many ways the selection of the period, and this population, compares in really interesting ways to Canada, parts of the Pacific (Fiji) or even Australasia, but the differences mean that Parle is loathe to find the connections here, passing over the potential comparison fairly quickly (p. 5). Instead, she focuses on situating her study firmly among other studies of African colonies and India. The book plots a history of mental health in Natal and Zululand through six chapters. The different threads in her work are each individually significant but also cohere as a single entity. Parle examines ideas about insanity; the institutionalisation of insanity between 1860 and 1910; the limits (and limitations) of ‘colonial psychiatry’ through an investigation of phenomena like witchcraft; care outside institutions; suicide and institutional administration between 1910 and 1918. In these chapters, Parle's work maps on to current scholarship in the wider field and reinterprets salient lines of inquiry, including how historians might analyse institutional patient populations; and how we can locate practices of extra-institutional care through families and communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".