3 - Petitions, Families, and Pathways to the Asylum

Summary

This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental health institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental health illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.