The missionary gave Head the following ominous warning: “You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If you’re not careful, you’ll get insane just like your mother.”
I begin with this genesis narrative, and am interested in the superintendent’s warning, since it captures in miniature, and takes shape around, a founding conflict that has animated Western notions of mental illness from the nineteenth century to the present. On the one hand, the warning (“you’ll get insane just like your mother”) presents madness as a taint in the blood, a degenerative flaw, passed relentlessly from mother to child. Mental illness here belongs in the inexorable and unanswerable domain of blood and biology.
At the same time, the warning (“you must be very careful”) presents madness as a behavioural flaw. Here mental illness belongs in the domain of discipline and punishment: “If you’re not careful. …” Mental illness, here, is presented as a behavioural condition subject to a carceral and punitive regime.
