Abstract

I can only speculate about the echo of slavery and its impact upon how theories of race are disconnected from theories of mental illness.Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.Why might psychiatry need postcolonial theories? Critical discourse on psychiatry and clinical psychology—itself quite heterogeneous across the humanities and the so-called psy disciplines—has intermittently focused on the redress of power in clinical encounters, which are often constituted by an interaction between persons in very different life circumstances and with divergent positions in relation to authority and privilege, or social capital and capital itself. Postcolonial theories are relevant to this topic because they...