Outrageous Reason: Madness and Race in Britain and Empire 1780‐2020 by PeterBarham. Published by PCCS Books, Monmouth, UK, 2023; xv11 + 248 pp, ISBN 9781915220394.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What connections might there be between the lives of a mixed-race seamstress/ governess in mid-19th century Kingston, Jamaica, and a white domestic servant in early 20th-century London?Henrietta Dawson and Alice Triggs are two of the case studies in this new book by Peter Barham, across nearly all of whom there was a deep connection: subjection to the abusive psychiatric regimes of their times.Their experiences were of course different.Dawson was taken to the Kingston Lunatic Asylum during an acute depressive episode in 1858.She recovered, and wrote about the ordeals which she had suffered and seen others undergo in the brutal asylum.Triggs was beset by depression and anxiety throughout her life, and from 1915 was a 'revolving door' patient in Colney Hatch and Napsbury Lunatic Asylums, receiving no real care or attention, before spending over 40 years at Napsbury until her death there in 1962.Both were from modest backgrounds, though not destitute.Dawson was the daughter of a lawyer, one of the colonial white men who gave ongoing financial support to the offspring of their liaisons with black women.Triggs' working-class parents died while she was in her teens, but her siblings appear to have been upwardly mobile, in contrast to her own fate.These and other richly detailed case studies are at the core of Barham's book, much of which builds on his previous work about connecting with and respecting the life-worlds of those now called 'service users', especially those labouring under diagnoses of psychosis.In this latest study, the author's interdisciplinary skill in weaving together psychology, history and sociology are deployed in his case analyses.But while focussed empirically on individual examples, he aims to show how within Britain and its empire a particular set of values has been at the centre both of the state's management of psychological distress and of the white racism characteristic of the imperial period.The clue to the content of these values is in the book's title.Barham does not explicitly unpack the phrase 'outrageous reason', but he does not need to.The message he draws from his case studies and develops into an overall narrative is that a moralistic model of rationality underpinned both racism and, as it emerged in the 19th century to shape the state's response to a range of problems, psychiatry.At the centre of this model was an image of 'reason', reflecting the outlook, behaviours and values of the dominant classes within Britain of the high imperial era.Where that 'reason' held sway, those unable or unwilling to inhabit that image were at best marginalised, and in danger of restrictive or punishing measures being taken against them.In this respect, mentally disturbed people and non-white people
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.006 |
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".