Origins and formative years

Over the past two decades, many issues concerning Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities’ access to equitable, culturally sensitive services and interventions in the UK have been highlighted (Littlewood 1982; Fernando 1988, 1991; Bhui 1999, 2002; Bhugra 2001a; National Institute for Mental Health in England 2003; Department of Health 2005a,b). Frantz Fanon was one of the earliest Black psychiatrists to highlight the inequalities in psy chiatric care on the basis of race, culture and religion. Fifty years after his death in 1961, this would be an auspicious time to highlight his pioneering contributions to the practice of psychiatry. His contributions to the genre of postcolonial literature (Loomba 1998; Gibson 2003) and the subsequent controversies surrounding his views on the advocacy of violence as a tool for colonial liberation have largely overshadowed the fact that he was a clinician who experimented with what is now known as social therapy, day hospitalisation and culturally sensitive treatment of people with mental illnesses. The very issues that he championed are still important today and it is my opinion that there is much to gain from reviewing the life and times of this pioneer in ethnopsychiatry, to see just how far such psychiatric theory and practice have moved in the past 50 years and what remains to be done in terms of equality in access to mental healthcare. In this review I concentrate on Fanon’s contributions to clinical psychiatry. My aim is not to validate his views, but to give a factual historical perspective on his work and contribution to psychiatric practice, in the hope that this may stimulate further scholarship into his writings.