Mandatory Madness offers a new perspective on a pivotal period in the history of modern Palestine, by putting mental illness and the psychiatric encounters it engendered at the heart of the story. Through a careful and creative reading of an eclectic mix of archival and published material, Mandatory Madness reveals how a range of actors - British colonial officials, Zionist health workers, Arab doctors and nurses, and Palestinian families - responded to mental illness in the decades before 1948. Rather than a concern of European Jewish psychiatric experts alone, questions around the causes, nature, and treatment of mental illness were negotiated across diverse and sometimes surprising sites in mandate Palestine: not only in underfunded and overcrowded government mental hospitals and private Jewish clinics, certainly, but also in family homes and neighbourhood streets, in colonial courtrooms and prisons and census offices, and in the itineraries of shaykhs and patients alike as they crossed newly drawn borders within the Levant. Bringing together histories of medicine, colonialism, and the modern Middle East, Mandatory Madness highlights how the seemingly personal and private matter of mental illness generated distinctive forms of entanglement: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region.

Honorable Mention, 2024 John Pickstone Prize, The British Society for the History of Science

‘Mandatory Madness is an important contribution to a modest but growing body of works that are challenging national and ideological narratives that have dominated the history of the Middle East far too long. Chris Sandal-Wilson weaves meticulously and soberly a fragmented history of mental health care in a highly contentious part of the world and compellingly demonstrates how disturbing and questioning the archive of colonial psychiatry can be performed.’

Joelle M. Abi-Rached - Harvard University

'Mandatory Madness offers a unique glimpse into complicated relationships between scientific expertise, colonial institutions and diverse indigenous populations in Mandate Palestine, using psychiatry and mental illness as the primary lens of analysis. Sandal-Wilson's research is a model example of how historians of psychiatry and psychopathology can open unexpected windows onto mainstream social and political histories, and histories of everyday life. The book offers a nuanced account of Ottoman and British imperial entanglements in Palestine, and moves beyond psychiatry's institutional boundaries in innovative ways in order to foreground the voices and agency of patients and their families.'

Ana Antic - University of Copenhagen

‘Through its focus on mental health and the biomedical institutions that sought to treat it, Sandal-Wilson's thoughtful work shines light on an unexplored facet of Palestinian history as well as the expectations and dynamics that structured interactions between Palestinians and the British mandate authorities.’

Jennifer Derr - University of California, Santa Cruz

‘Mandatory Madness is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history of Mandate Palestine and the history of the psy-sciences. Sandal-Wilson brilliantly assembles British officials, Palestinians and Jewish émigrés from the archive to demonstrate how colonial officials sought to render madness legible and calculable, while patients and families sought to render madness manageable. The result is a rich social history of Mandate Palestine which recenters the history of mental illness and psychiatry from a patient perspective and takes place as much in institutional settings as it does in homes and other quotidian social spaces.’

Omnia El Shakry - Yale University

‘A brilliant examination of the Palestinian engagement with mental illness and colonial psychiatric practice during the Mandate period. This book fills a necessary void on this almost tabooed subject in literature on madness in the Arab world. Sandal-Wilson’s Mandatory Madness scholarly work is enhanced by an accessible and thrilling style that reads like a detective novel, including a number of case studies that humanises the bureaucratic reporting about mental illness, such as the story of patient Mariam B, and the tragic saga of Hassan al-Labadi, who was driven into madness by his continued political incarceration.’

Salim Tamari - Birzeit University