How do politics, violence, psychology, colonization intersect? - Dan David Prize winner

The Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world, was awarded on Wednesday at Tel Aviv University to nine emerging scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the past in bold and creative ways.

Each of the winners – who work in Kenya, Ireland, Denmark, Israel, Canada and the United States – received $300,000 (NIS 1.1 million), in recognition of their achievements and to support their future endeavors.

“Our winners represent the new generation of historians,” said Ariel David, board member of the prize and son of the founder. “They are changing our understanding of the past by asking new questions, targeting under-researched topics and using innovative methods. Many of the winners we are recognizing today are still in the early stages of their careers, but they have already challenged how we think about history. Understanding the past, in all its complexity, is critical to illuminating the present and confronting the challenges of the future.”

“Insights about the past should circulate through every part of every community,” said professor Aviad Kleinberg, historian and Dan David Prize board member. “We all share a past. We all shape the future. Knowledge of the past – historical, not mythological – belongs to everyone. A culture that does not understand its past is like an individual with acute amnesia. Amnesia makes one bear the past’s consequences without awareness of it and without the power to escape it.”

The Dan David Prize, endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University, was first established in 2001 by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Dan David, to reward innovative and interdisciplinary work that contributed to humanity. In 2021, the prize was relaunched with a focus on historical research, honoring the founder’s passion for history and archaeology. Today, the prize rewards emerging scholars, aiming to help both academics and public historians fulfill their potential at a time when support for the humanities is dwindling.

On the eve of the ceremony, I met one of the laureates, Dr. Ana Antic. Born and raised in Serbia, Antic is a professor of European history at Copenhagen University. Her research focuses on the relationship between politics, violence and psychiatry in 20th-century Europe, as well as the decolonization of psychiatric practices and concepts. Antic’s research explores the historical development of ideas about the human psyche, pathology and normality, and approaches these debates as windows into some of the most important political and social issues in modern history. She also examines how decolonization and the Cold War shaped different societies’ understanding of the human mind, psychology, suffering and healing. Her work is driven by the argument that psychology disciplines have played a vital role in crucial ideological conflicts and debates.

ANTIC IS the author of Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War: Revolution, Emancipation and Re-Imagining the Human Psyche (Springer Nature, 2022).

“I started as a historian of Eastern Europe. My first book was about that, now I moved more to the global history field, focusing on the history of psychiatry. It is a history of the profession and also psychiatry ideas about the mind and what was considered a pathology in the context of mental illnesses. So now, I look more into the field of psychiatry decolonization and how psychiatry has changed.”

How to decolonize psychiatry

Decolonizing psychiatry is a movement and framework aimed at challenging and transforming the Western-centric approaches and assumptions that dominate the field of psychiatry. At its core, decolonizing psychiatry acknowledges that mental health and well-being are deeply rooted in cultural, social and historical contexts. It recognizes that different cultures have unique ways of understanding and addressing mental health challenges and that these diverse perspectives should be respected and integrated into mental healthcare practices.

“We know very little of what happened to psychiatry during decolonization. Because medicine and psychiatry were such important pillars in colonization, many psychiatric researchers justified colonization in different places. Think of Algeria, Kenya and India, of course, where psychiatrists used the indigenous population not only as a laboratory but also to come up with theories about the differences between the European mind and the non-European mind. It was a very racist hierarchy,” she says.

One of the key aspects of decolonizing psychiatry is challenging the power imbalances and hierarchies that exist within the field. It questions the dominance of Western knowledge and seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, including Indigenous peoples, people of color and other historically oppressed groups. By centering their knowledge and expertise, decolonizing psychiatry aims to create more inclusive and culturally sensitive approaches to mental health.

“Establishing other civilizations as ‘Incapable of governing themselves’, was often used to justify colonialism, and this applied also to the way Nazis used scientific psychiatry to justify exterminating mentally ill people, as they described them,” she says. “After the war, these ideas were, of course, disgraced and then somehow psychiatry tried to remove itself from these ideas.”

Decolonizing psychiatry advocates for an intersectional understanding of mental health, recognizing that multiple forms of oppression and discrimination intersect and impact mental well-being. It acknowledges the importance of addressing systemic issues, such as racism, colonialism, poverty and inequality in order to promote mental health equity and social justice. “Even now,” says Antic, with the progressive idea of universality and talking about cultural differences as opposed to biological or psychological differences, research is still mostly based on the European mind, usually the white, European, male mind.”

Antic believes that in order to avoid such pitfalls, one needs to understand the history of psychiatry. “I am interested in how people thought about the human mind, the human psyche, and I think that the way people think about that is fundamental to how society works. If you really want to learn about a society and its values, you need to learn how they think about what makes us human, how they look at the mind and also what they define as pathological. What they consider subversive or dangerous, or needs curing. I think that from that you can learn about fears and taboos. Of course, most people do not end up in the psychiatric ward, but you can learn a lot about what society fears from the files about people who are ill. At some point, it was homosexuality.”

Antic also talks about how in the past trauma was not recognized and people who were post-traumatic were considered ill. “After World War II, people who were physically injured were treated but no one addressed survivors who suffered from mental trauma. If you were not physically injured, you were OK, or you were considered mentally ill.”

“I think it is very important to understand the relations between mental illness and violence and politics,” stresses Antic. “Even today in Europe, most psychiatrists treating people who have suffered from racism or violence, especially immigrants, do not engage in politics. They don’t have time to do that and to understand the relationships between politics and violence in relation to psychiatry.”

“I believe that if I, who came from Yugoslavia and experienced war, came to a psychiatrist in Denmark, I think I would have wanted them to engage with the politics that caused my suffering. Not to treat only my symptoms but to understand the broader picture.”

By challenging power imbalances, embracing cultural diversity and fostering community collaboration, decolonizing psychiatry aims to create more inclusive, culturally sensitive and equitable mental health systems that respect and honor the diverse experiences and knowledge of all individuals and communities.

“You can very easily pathologize resistance as illness. In psychiatry, you do not have laboratory tests to prove anything. What do you do when you live in a society that is pathological and you go against social norms? She asks. “In Yugoslavia, in the 1960s, a psychiatrist said the problem is that you cannot pathologize an individual without understanding the context that they come from when the context is pathological. How do you pathologize resistance? In the clinical language, it is very easy to do that.”

Antic says that if it is pathological to adjust to a sick society, then the healthy reaction would actually be to be in conflict with that society. But being in conflict with society can be considered pathological. So revolutionary personalities will often be considered pathological.