Race, alcohol and general paralysis: Emil Kraepelin’s comparative psychiatry and his trips to Java (1904) and North America (1925)

Abstract

This article examines Emil Kraepelin's notion of comparative psychiatry and relates it to the clinical research he conducted at psychiatric hospitals in South-East Asia (1904) and the USA (1925). It argues that his research fits awkwardly within the common historiographic narratives of colonial psychiatry. It also disputes claims that his work can be interpreted meaningfully as the fons et origio of transcultural psychiatry. Instead, it argues that his comparative psychiatry was part of a larger neo-Lamarckian project of clinical epidemiology and was thus primarily a reflection of his own long-standing diagnostic practices and research agendas. However, the hospitals in Java and America exposed the institutional constraints and limitations of those practices and agendas.

Revisiting Emil Kraepelin’s eugenic arguments

“…The theory offered him a comprehensive framework for understanding the pathogenesis of mental disorders. Moreover, it served as a conceptual tool for Kraepelin to examine society at large, and he extended the rhetoric of acquired germ lesions in individuals to that of the population as a whole (Engstrom and Crozier, 2018: 265). Although the degeneration theory itself is a broad concept that he did not fully endorse, he was profoundly influenced by it in constructing his own political-social arguments (Hoff, 1994, 2008).…”

Changing Landscape of Mental Health from Early Career Psychiatrists’ Perspective in Indonesia

“…1,2 Mental health services using a modern medical model can be traced back to the Dutch Colonial period, where the treatment was mainly provided in asylums. 3 In today's era, despite some important breakthroughs, such as the ratification of the Mental Health Act and the implementation of Universal Health Coverage in 2014, the status of the Indonesian mental health system is still viewed as underdeveloped and falls behind its neighboring countries. 4,5 This perspective is reflected by the facts of low government funding for mental health, the low availability of mental health professionals, and the high treatment gap.…”

Ethnographic Methods for Identifying Cultural Concepts of Distress: Developing Reliable and Valid Measures

“…Cross-cultural psy-disciplines (Rose 1998) like psychology and psychiatry originated to understand psychological pathologies in colonial projects outside of Europe, as well as the impacts of urbanization in Europe (Moreau 1843;Rousseau 1762). Early comparative psychiatry (vergleichende Psychiatrie) focused on finding analogous Western psychiatric pathologies in non-Western societies, such as Emile Kraepelin (1904) linking epilepsy and catatonia with amok in Java (Engstrom and Crozier 2018). Crucially, crosscultural psy-ences developed among populations experiencing violent social upheaval and subjugation through colonization, which was rarely taken into account (Fanon 2008;Macey 1996).…”