Researcher Emiliano Camargo David offers us a blunt answer: every Brazilian asylum has in its genesis the racist and colonial heritage of slave ships. For him, racism is not a detail, but the engine that historically organized the processes of exclusion in our country.

The Concept of Manicoloniality

David proposes the term “manicoloniality” to describe how the psychiatrization of madness and racism operate together in coloniality. Historically, the West did not create the figures of “mad” and “black” separately; both were fixed in the domain of unreason to justify their exclusion and control. In Brazil, expressions such as “crazy creoulo” and “nega crazy” manifest this perverse union that pathologizes black bodies and racializes mental health.

To face this structure, David outlines three “power ideas” to radicalize care:

1. Bewilderment: Escaping Eurocentric Reason

Mental health users often say they are “bewildered”. David reframes this term as a political necessity: we need to move away from the “North” as the sole center of knowledge. In dialogue with Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, bewilderment is the affirmation of madness and blackness as forms of life, breaking with subordination to the white and rational Western norm. It is to recognize that medical science, in colonial contexts, often acted as a tool of humiliation and denial of others' humanity.

The disregard for the arts and crafts of Afro-diasporic care, which have survived over centuries and constitute an instrument of struggle, resistance and healing, are rarely taken into account in the vast majority of Brazilian health policies.

2. Antimanicolonial: Fostering the Diasporic Imagination

The anti-manicolonial struggle proposes that the fight against asylums and the fight against racism are inseparable. Inspired by authors such as Paul Gilroy, Lélia Gonzalez and Édouard Glissant, David suggests that care must encourage the free and countercultural exercise of “imagining diasporas” for a Relationship that moves us from the “colonial perspective of conquering to the decolonial perspective of knowing”. This means recognizing the power of the transatlantic experience and “Americanness” as sources of resistance and the creation of new subjectivities that seek the humanity stolen by racism.

3. Aquilombar: An Ethics of Freedom and Care

Aquimbamento is presented as a libertarian practice in mental health. Drinking from the source of Abdias do Nascimento's “quilombismo” and Clóvis Moura's “quilombagem” means understanding quilombo not as something fixed in the past, but as a living metaphor to radicalize relationships in difference.

Becoming Quilomba: relying on Mariléa de Almeida and Beatriz Nascimento, David highlights that the quilombo is a force of singularization and an ethic of care (for oneself, for others and for the territory) that opposes the model of violent and sexist power. “The memory of being in adversity constitutes us and that the recovery of the quilombo identity, in memory, history and existence, would allow each individual to be a quilombo, in their power of subjectivation”.

In the black diaspora we find civilizational elements that do not aim at domination, but ways of relationship and disoriented cultural aspects that guide relationships in difference: “for those who suffered colonial domination [...], the recovery of this part of humanity often involves the proclamation of difference”.

Healing the Soul is a Political Act

Decoloniality in mental health requires that we recognize the sociogeny of suffering: the marks on the subjects' souls are not only biological, but the result of colonial oppression renewed by everyday racism. As Neusa Santos Souza teaches, knowing oneself as black in a white world means living under an identity that is often massacred, which demands the construction of new ideals of ego and collective belonging.

Investing in science and anti-manicolonial care is, in short, transforming the therapeutic space into a place for the recovery of humanity and awakening to political activism.

Related articles:

Decolonizing the Look: Why does mental health in the Global South need a popular science? Bridge over the Ocean: How Popular Science can transform mental health in Mozambique. When the community takes control of mental health.