African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return

Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out.

For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been subject to a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry. Instead of displacing African therapeutic traditions, he argues, European psychiatric institutions in fact built upon...