Welcome to Psypartitions

Who cares about people with mental health conditions in times of crisis? When things fall apart, is psychiatric provision an extravagance or essential? How might the extremes of state collapse, ethnic cleansing, and political violence distort some of the taken-for-granted norms of medical practice, such that care might become complicity, abandonment a form of protection, neutrality impossible? With the support of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2025-30), Psypartitions addresses these questions – and more – in order to investigate the politics of psychiatry in partition contexts across the twentieth century.

Psypartitions puts psychiatry at the heart of the story of partition, and partition at the heart of the story of psychiatry. Doing so will transform how we do the history of partitions – how and when and where they unfold, whose perspectives we can centre – and it will generate a novel framework for analysing the interaction between politics and psychiatry in times of crisis, a framework built around three core themes: the experiences of psychiatric patients and their families; the politicisation of responsibility for their care; and the role played by psychiatric knowledge within conflict. Through deep dives into key case studies – the Greek-Turkish population exchange in the 1920s, the Partition of India in the 1940s, and the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s – and longitudinal analysis of international humanitarian interventions into partition contexts across the century, the project team will draw on an ambitious range of research methods and materials to develop a new global history of the politics of psychiatry in the century of partition.