The Persistence of History: Racism, Anti-Blackness and the Causes of Mental Ill Health, c.1800-2020

This article offers an overview, historicising how both ‘race’ and racism have been seen as an aetiological root for mental ill health in people racialised as Black, and contextualising the rise of transcultural psychiatry. Heeding the calls of the few historians to study race, mental health and transcultural psychiatry in the metropole and across the globe, this article includes a wider variety of voices in order to create a dialogue between these histories and their historiographies. Drawing extensively on the global historiography and embracing contemporary research that demonstrates the persistence of racism in psychiatry and research, we use medical publications and a prosopographical lens to explore the push from radical psychiatrists to uproot racism and anti-Blackness in psychiatry and instead recognise the impact of racism on mental health. This article considers the practice and activism of three late-twentieth century UK-trained clinicians: Jamaican Frederick Hickling (1944-2020), British-Jamaican Aggrey Burke (b1943) and British-Sri Lankan Suman Fernando (b1932). By shifting the gaze of the historiography, we argue that beyond the towering figures of Frantz Fanon and Thomas Adeoye Lambo, psychiatrists were engaged in anti-racism and decolonisation using history—and doing so long before decolonisation became a watchword for historians.