The suicide of slaves in Sao Paulo during the last two decades of slavery

News stories printed in Gazeta de Campinas (1871-1887) are used to investigate the views expressed at the time of the suicides of captives and freedmen in Sao Paulo province, and to discuss the data available. As suicide is a form of human behavior which cannot be reduced to one single explanation, it does not seem justifiable that amongst the slaves, these cases should also be taken as self-explanatory because of the conditions in which they occurred. By noting the circumstances in which these acts took place, it is hoped that the fallacy of oversimplified explanations can be belied, which refer to the suicide of slaves as quite simply being due to a 'dislike of captivity'.15237138

Some origins of cross-cultural psychiatry

The interface between insanity, race and culture was a challenging subject for some of the most influential nineteenth-century alienists. Our paper reviews some of the theoretical and clinical investigations of comparative psychiatry of this period. The idea that insanity was supposedly rare among 'primitive' people, e.g., Africans, American Natives and some Eastern populations, was repeatedly defended by prominent alienists. Associated with this notion, many authors believed that insanity tends to become more prevalent as civilization evolves. According to them, civilization had an unfavourable effect on insanity rates because it demanded a much higher degree of organization and mental production. Moreover, a greater degree of mental excitation would explain why insanity occurs more frequently in Europe than in the East, Africa or South America. Eventually, at the end of the nineteenth century, the coalition of cross-cultural and neuropsychiatry produced a notion that the brain of the 'native' is more simple and crude than that of the civilized, and more vulnerable to the evil effects of civilized life. In conclusion, some ethnocentric bias and racial stereotypes still pervasive in contemporary psychiatry are identified and traced back to their historical origins.16215516