Congratulations to Jessica Casey, MA, winner of the best student paper delivered at the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine conference.

Jessica Casey is a Master’s student in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) program at the University of British Columbia, where she studies connections between science, medicine, and colonial systems. She holds a conjoined BA in Contemporary Studies and Social Anthropology from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. Jessica is a Newfoundlander and former community health worker of mixed European and Nunatsiavut Inuit ancestry with a long-held interest in Indigenous health. She brings these commitments and experiences to her research in the history and philosophy of science. Her current thesis research investigates the scientific studies in the 1960s and 1970s which supported the DSM classification of an Indigenous-specific mental health condition, with an emphasis on analyzing race science’s impact on scientific practice.

In addition to working under the supervision of Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek (Nursing), Jessica worked closely with a number of STS faculty, including Dr. Alison Wylie, who was on her committee and oversaw her Research Assistant role, and Dr. Ian Hill, STS Director. 

During her time as an interdisciplinary student at UBC, Jessica also served as co-chair of the Green College Residents’ Council.

Jessica’s paper was extremely impressive and her presentation was stunning and engaging! This prestigious award signals her competency at conducting and communicating her research in the field of the history of medicine. ~ Dr. Lydia Wytenbroek

Inventing Arctic Hysteria: Colonial Power, Psychiatric Research, and the Culture-Bound Disorder, 1960 to 1980 
/ L’invention de l’hystérie arctique : pouvoir colonial, recherche psychiatrique et syndrome lié à la culture, 1960 à 1980

My study explores the evolution of “arctic hysteria” from 1894, when the term was first used by a white settler to describe the “erratic” behaviour of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic, to the 1990s, when the American Psychological Association and World Health Organization designated “arctic hysteria” as an official diagnostic classification. Throughout the twentieth century, American and Canadian academics allied with colonizing state authorities to compile indirect observations from settler explorers, perform unethical studies, and publish their conclusions. This research included physician-ethnographer Edward Foulks’ fieldwork in Alaska in 1969. These cross-disciplinary efforts to invent a disorder exclusive to Arctic Indigenous Peoples were successful, and the classification persisted in mainstream literature until the 2010s.

In this presentation, I will fill a gap in the literature by offering a critical review of the research supporting the formal medicalization of “arctic hysteria.” Drawing on writings and field reports from settler scientists, including Foulks, in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that these researchers construct “natural” racial and cultural hierarchies that act as an organizing principle across their research. I explore how scientists’ ambitions to discover a “culture-bound disorder” clashed with mainstream psychiatry’s emphasis on culturally universal disease categories. Therefore, researchers used tenuous evidence to construct a racialized pathology without invalidating dominant paradigms in psychiatric knowledge. Though their conclusions lack scientific merit, “arctic hysteria” offers a valuable historical case study on the impacts of race science on scientific rigour in medical research.