This chapter examines encounters around mental health illness that played out within mandate Palestine’s hybrid legal system. Issues of mental competency and legal responsibility were debated across civil and religious courts, but this chapter focuses on the criminal courtroom and criminal insanity defences. Criminal insanity defences forced mandate judges, medical experts, and lay witnesses to debate what forms of behaviour and thought were evidence of mental health illness, and what should, by contrast, be considered normal, ‘rational’, and therefore punishable for a given defendant. Through a close reading of two exemplary cases, this chapter moves beyond the historiography’s focus on cultural difference to highlight how different bodies of knowledge – psychiatric, social, and folkloric – were put to work to define the ‘normal’ in relation to other axes of identity like age, class, and gender. A third case, which played out against the backdrop of the Palestinian great revolt, meanwhile reveals how understandings of the ‘normal’ could be warped by wider political circumstances, with life-or-death consequences for defendants.

This chapter focuses on the hundreds of the so-called criminal lunatics who appeared to slip between the gaps in psychiatric provision over the 1940s and ended up in the lunatic sections of the mandate’s prisons. Their abandonment, this chapter argues, was the product of often- fraught negotiations across state and society: mandate officials in particular worried that the families of the mentally ill were staging minor criminal offences in order to have their relatives bypass long waiting lists and access institutional provision. Through a careful reading of case files from the rich archive of the criminal lunatic section at Acre, this chapter delves into the complex dynamics that surrounded these individuals’ routes into – as well as out of – this institutional site. These stories reveal that neither insanity nor criminality was a stable category in mandate Palestine. But the case files, particularly the ‘delusions’ they record, also hold out the possibility of recovering the experiences and perspectives of those deemed criminally insane, and indeed their capacity to exercise a degree of agency over their lives.