Colonial and transcultural psychiatries: What we learn from history

Transcultural psychiatry as a discipline has a well-documented history and is now the subject of numerous retrospectives that chart the development and the shifting conceptual agendas of the field. In contrast, what we have come to think of as "colonial psychiatry" exists primarily as a historiographical category within which historians of medicine, psychiatry, or imperialism may contextualize the imposition ofWestern categories of "normal" psychology and deviance, race, and difference, as well as greater attention paid to the lived experience of colonialism and the politics of resistance. Ultimately, these disparate but entangled bodies of literature engage with larger questions of the universality of experience and expressions of suffering and distress amidst unequal power relations.