Precarious Families, “Danger,” and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters

Romain Tiquet, “Precarious Families, ‘Danger,’ and Psychiatric Internment in 1960s Dakar: An Archive of Kin Letters”: This chapter sheds light on a collection of previously unexplored letters written by family members to the governor of the Cape Verde Peninsula in the 1960s, asking for the commitment of a close relative to the Fann psychiatric clinic in Dakar, Senegal. By examining these letters, the chapter hopes to move beyond the practice of focusing too closely on the sole framework of the colonial psychiatric ward. Furthermore, this chapter adds a historical dimension to the literature on the relationship between family care and mental illness in West Africa. Forms of care for the mentally ill are dependent on multiple factors that must be taken into account in order to analyze how the moral (as well as the social and economic) ideal of family care is challenged on a daily basis according to different parameters (access to resources for health care, the nature of mental illness, the strength of family solidarity, etc.).