Multiple Psychiatries: Re-Membering Psychiatry in Contemporary Anglophone Novels

Christina Slopek-Hauff

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Chapter 12 Multiple Psychiatries: Re-Membering Psychiatry in Contemporary Anglophone Novels

In: The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

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Christina Slopek-Hauff

Christina Slopek-Hauff
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 255–278

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745247_014

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Abstract

A deeply fraught cultural heritage, psychiatry as it is commonly understood is intricately connected to Western concepts of reason and science (Stengers 2000; Foucault 2006). European colonial powers dismissed local, non-Eurocentric understandings of psyche, mind and body and displaced non-Western approaches to psychiatric therapy. Today, Western-based psychiatry still dominates the field. Striving to redress this imbalance, a number of scholars have been committed to implementing non-Western concepts of subjectivity and related concepts of mental health and distress within disability and social studies as well as in psychology and psychiatry (Fernando and Moodley 2018). As a medical humanities approach shows, postcolonial and transcultural literatures are also invested in such efforts of pluralizing psychiatry. Hence, this chapter engages closely with Mira Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful (2019) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), showing how they radically re-member Anglo-Eurocentric discourses and practices of psychiatry.

Everything Here Is Beautiful zooms in on the experiences with psychiatry the Chinese American character Lucy, who lives with schizophrenia, and her family go through. In the course of her life, Lucy comes into contact with diverse cultures and their different ways of treating mental illness. These differences and discrepancies are expressed by the novel’s use of fragmentary narration and multiperspectivity, which provide different assessments of Lucy’s condition and undo unitary narratives of mental illness. Furthermore, using intertextuality as a form of memory (cf. Lachmann 2008), Everything Here Is Beautiful critically addresses the history of psychiatric therapy and hospitalisation in the US and brings it into dialog with non-hegemonic psychiatric practice. The protagonist of Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Ada, is inhabited by spirits. In Western medical terms, Ada would be diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Freshwater plays with this diagnosis but strongly affirms Igbo culture, where these spirits are known as ‘ogbanje’. Hence, Freshwater effectively counters the primacy of Western science and medicine and insists on the legitimacy of Igbo ogbanje in contrast to Western diagnoses. By re-membering and bringing into dialog entire discourses of psychiatry, Everything Here Is Beautiful and Freshwater powerfully confirm the necessity to reconsider psychiatry from culture-specific points of view. Combining literary analysis, memory studies, disability studies, medical humanities and postcolonial studies, this chapter shows how the texts overcome the thrust of Western psychiatry and revitalise multiple culture-specific forms of psychiatry that offer more nuanced, culturally attuned understandings of mental distress and its treatments in Anglophone novels from a transcultural contemporary.

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 4

Cover The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004745247

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 13 Nov 2025

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Chapter 12 Multiple Psychiatries: Re-Membering Psychiatry in Contemporary Anglophone Novels

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

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