| Summary: | This thesis examines contemporary British transcultural psychiatry and the consequences of its practices for multi-cultural populations in metropolitan situations. It uses a combined methodology of conceptuaL textual analyses and participant observation, to explore how transcultural psychiatry constructs relationships between culture and mental disorders. In particular it examines the complexity of defining normality and pathology in this area. The intellectual origins of transcultural psychiatry in the context of colonial medical practice are explored with two aims in mind. First to show historically how the present-day theories and practices of transcultural psychiatry came into being. Second, to present an alternative picture to that painted of transcultural psychiatry by its critics. The critics see it as a racist ideology and form of domination that is forced to repeat colonial oppression in post-colonial situations. A series of case studies of key colonial psychiatrists, Laubscher, Corothers and Octave MannonL is presented to explore the logics and models of transcultural psychiatry. This exploration shows how the status and nature of transcultural psychiatry is far more intricate and ambiguous than its critics moral and political understanding can allow. This is underscored by a detailed examination of the thought of the first anti-racist revolutionary cultural psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The role of Fanon's ideas in shaping contemporary transcultural psychiatry is explored. Ironically, Fanon's models inspire both the anti-racist ethics of transcultural psychiatry and those who are radically opposed to any psychiatric intervention. Fieldwork observations of transcultural clinicalpractice and its alternatives point to the complexity of the ways in which ethicaL political and intellectual models are used when psychiatrists attempt to tell the truth about racism and madness in society and cure the suffering of ethnic patients
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