Common Ground between Geneva and Developing Countries in the WHO’s First Social Psychiatry Project

Abstract

In this paper I interrogate the space in which the exchange of knowledge, the sharing of methods, and the formation of collaborative research were enabled between the WHO and its member states. I first provide short examples in which knowledge transfer occurred between the WHO and its Latin America and African collaborators. As a case in point, I further discuss a series of large-scale epidemiological studies on mental disorders which were conducted by the research team of National Taiwan University Hospital in the early postwar years, regarding their purpose, significance, and legacy within Taiwan and in the international social psychiatry projects led by the WHO. I analyze the active and passive roles these studies played in the context of postwar decolonization and the milieu of scientific internationalism in the new world order created by the United Nations and its specialized agencies. As influenced by the survey-based Japanese ethnological studies developed in the first half of the 20th century and designed for the purpose of building discipline after WWII, the psychiatric epidemiological research conducted in Taiwan not only reflected the vision of the international scientific communities to “deracialize” the human sciences but also fulfilled the pursuit of knowledge by the WHO ideology of “world citizenship”. The approach of cultural determinism not only matched the then dominant neo-Freudian theories of psychopathology, which moved away from the bequest of biodeterminism from colonial psychiatry, but also laid the foundation for the universal profiles of mental disorders, which the WHO mental health experts attempted to establish. Responding to existing historical accounts commenting on projects conducted by the WHO, I also offer a conceptual framework to rethink the relationship between Geneva and its target developing countries. The tie between the WHO and its member states not only exemplifies the “trading zone” explained by science historians vis-à-vis the collaboration among scientists of various cultures and languages, as mobilized by the exchange of thoughts and methods, but also reflects the “dreamscape” propagated by STS scholars, after which developing countries shaped their identities as postwar modern states with sociotechnological imageries exercised beyond the WHO’s ideological framework centered in Geneva. Such effort of national self-fashioning and administrative pilgrimage enabled scientists from the WHO’s member states to participate in international scientific collaborative projects. WHO’s projects could not have been conducted without a world that was mutually imagined by its headquarters and member states. At the end of the presentation the author also comments on the achievements and fallacies of this shortlived optimism.