Beyond the Asylum

This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.â• Choice

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century.

Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

Claire Edington is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Beyond the Asylum has received the Weatherhead East Asian Institute's prestigious First Book Prize.

[T]his is an admirable and valuable publication. The work provides a much needed study of the colonial asylum and modern psychiatry's interaction with Vietnamese society. The author's argument is convincing, research robust, and writing flawless.

The author includes a lot of comment on the sociological impetuses and impacts of such problems and discusses the reasons behind the developments which took place, in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century in Vietnam, to cope with the rise of understanding of the problems of mental health.

Edington's account is distinguished by the way she escapes the confines of the asylum—and a certain kind of postcolonial scholarship—and instead uses the history of psychiatry and mental illness as a means to explore the wider dynamics of colonial rule. In so doing, she engages with important debates across a range of fields, most notably the history of medicine, the history of imperialism, and Vietnamese studies

Beyond the Asylum is a brilliant piece of research, draw[ing] on extensive work in Vietnamese, French, and Cambodian archives. When combined with her gifted prose, Edington's meticulous research comes alive, giving the reader a sense of meeting some of the patients, doctors, and families that she discusses.

This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.

Richard C. Keller, author of Colonial Madness:

The importance of this book can't be overstated. Edington has provided us with an account of the emergence of a new diffuse psychiatric power, bound not only to institutions and the colonial state, but also to social norms of the community. She engages with some of the fundamental questions in the history of empire.

Peter Zinoman, author of Vietnamese Colonial Republican:

A pathbreaking study—well-written and intelligently argued. Edington draws on a rich trove of official sources from colonial archives in Vietnam and France, as well as material from a vibrant local press of the day. An impressive achievement.

Christopher Goscha, author of Vietnam: A New History:

I know of no other study on the history of colonial psychiatry in Vietnam or in France's empire of this caliber and sophistication. Beyond the Asylum will become a classic in the field.