Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves by Lio Mangubat

Author:Lio Mangubat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-981-18-9637-8
Publisher: Faction Press
Published: 2024-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Frustrated desires. More than the hot weather, more than the stifling tropical climate, this was the deadly root that latched onto the white men’s psyche, cracking their mental bedrock. These desires, naturally, were mostly sexual in nature. We are talking about Freudian theory, after all.

Commander Joseph C. Thompson wrote that mental breakdowns in the tropics were “the result of a conflict in the patient’s mind. The conflict is regularly between the desires created by the repressed libido and the demands of the cultural environment.” Faced with stresses, a person could either face the real world head on, or flee from reality, resulting in a breakdown marked by, as Thompson described it, “the entire gamut of human frailty and neurotic symptoms.”

In that sense, Fielding was ahead of the curve. Familiar with Freud even before he arrived in the Philippines, the literate military officer poured numerous references to his own repressions in the ramblings of his journal. A Freudian-minded doctor digging through his notebooks would have found rock-solid confirmation that, yes indeed, when an American goes mad in the Philippines, buried feelings of sex were definitely involved.

Across the colonial world, a more psychologically rigorous lens was being adopted by a new generation of doctors. Maybe the older ones were still a bit nervous, a little touchy around the subject of sex and repressed desires, and still explained away nervous breakdowns because of the climate. But the younger ones became more inclined to dive into a patient’s inner world — especially since diseases like philippinitis were already sweeping the globe. In Guam, Panama, Puerto Rico, the West Indies, West Africa, India, China, Australia, white men found themselves felled by strange mental disorders. Philippinitis was only one of its names. It was also known colloquially as “Japan head” or “colonial psychosis” or “brain fag”. In medical journals, doctors called it tropical neurasthenia — and if we were to believe the reports, it was fast becoming a worldwide pandemic.

The book Manson’s Tropical Diseases claimed that tropical neurasthenia caused far more damage in colonies around the world than any other disease — including malaria. It was discussed in most of the world’s major medical journals, across many languages. From a hospital in Uganda to missions in Japan, its widespread diagnosis in the first half of the twentieth century reflected the anxieties of empire colliding with the growing field of medical research: mental health, from a colonial masters’ lens.

The thing with tropical neurasthenia was that its symptoms were too flexible, its definitions too fuzzy. Today, we’d probably classify many of the outward manifestations of tropical neurasthenia as depression, or anxiety disorder, or chronic fatigue, or illnesses like fibromyalgia — except somehow only applied to white men, whose job it was to remain steadfast at the wheel of empire.

“[T]ropical neurasthenia was subjected to divergent interpretations during the first half of the twentieth century,” wrote psychiatry historian Wen Ji-Wang. As the old guard of empire fell apart after World War II, it fell out of favor as a medical diagnosis.

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