This chapter focuses on the final decade of the mandate period, which was marked by notable investment in both psychiatric institutions and expertise. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and with partition on the horizon, this chapter traces two developments in particular: the opening of the third and final government mental hospital at Jaffa in 1944, and the cultivation of expertise within the department of health around wartime trauma and mental nursing. Far from reflecting any new vision for colonial development on the part of the mandate government, a closer look at each of these developments reveals that investment was driven as much by colonial subjects and crisis as by British design, and built figuratively and literally on the foundations of the past.

This chapter centres the encounter between patient and psychiatrist, and between mandate Palestine and new methods of psychiatric treatment being developed around the world in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, it focuses on three distinct methods of treatment: patient work or occupational therapy; insulin- and cardiazol-shock therapies; and electro-convulsive therapy. All in different ways sought to work (on) the body to cure the mind, and were introduced into private and government mental institutions in mandate Palestine in the decade before 1948. Though these techniques tantalised with the promise of transcending context through their universal applicability, this chapter highlights instead how these psychiatric techniques travelled to and were deployed within Palestine in a highly uneven way, and attempts to piece together some sense of how patients and their families responded to and understood these treatments as well.

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 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 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.

This chapter reconstructs the dynamics of the initial encounter between the British and the question of mental illness in Palestine into the 1920s. Far from recapitulating a familiar narrative about the colonial introduction of psychiatry as a moment of rupture, it instead offers a multi-layered account of the opening of the first government mental hospital at Bethlehem, in order to highlight how the British were in fact latecomers to an ongoing history of psychiatry in Palestine. Well before the British occupation of 1917, Palestinians had recourse to a range of medical and non-medical options for the management of the mentally ill, and those existing understandings, experiences, and institutions crucially shaped how the British responded to mental illness across these formative years. As well as tracing the establishment of a key institution, this chapter also introduces a central figure in the history of psychiatry in mandate Palestine: Dr Mikhail Shedid Malouf.