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What connections might there be between the lives of a mixed-race seamstress/governess in mid-19th century Kingston, Jamaica, and a white domestic servant in early 20th-century London? Henrietta Dawson and Alice Triggs are two of the case studies in this new book by Peter Barham, across nearly all of whom there was a deep connection: subjection to the abusive psychiatric regimes of their times. Their experiences were of course different. Dawson was taken to the Kingston Lunatic Asylum during an acute depressive episode in 1858. She recovered, and wrote about the ordeals which she had suffered and seen others undergo in the brutal asylum. Triggs was beset by depression and anxiety throughout her life, and from 1915 was a ‘revolving door’ patient in Colney Hatch and Napsbury Lunatic Asylums, receiving no real care or attention, before spending over 40 years at Napsbury until her death there in 1962. Both were from modest backgrounds, though not destitute. Dawson was the daughter of a lawyer, one of the colonial white men who gave ongoing financial support to the offspring of their liaisons with black women. Triggs’ working-class parents died while she was in her teens, but her siblings appear to have been upwardly mobile, in contrast to her own fate.
These and other richly detailed case studies are at the core of Barham's book, much of which builds on his previous work about connecting with and respecting the life-worlds of those now called ‘service users’, especially those labouring under diagnoses of psychosis. In this latest study, the author's interdisciplinary skill in weaving together psychology, history and sociology are deployed in his case analyses. But while focussed empirically on individual examples, he aims to show how within Britain and its empire a particular set of values has been at the centre both of the state's management of psychological distress and of the white racism characteristic of the imperial period. The clue to the content of these values i