Measuring emotions: schizophrenia and family across cultural boundaries

This article explores how psychiatrists conceptualised the role of family relations and emotional atmospheres in the context of schizophrenia research in the second half of the twentieth century. It traces how families became the primary site to be mined and measured to explain schizophrenia's onset, course and outcome, and zooms in on global psychiatric investigations of expressed emotion in families of schizophrenic patients, which aimed to offer a theoretical framework for understanding one of the most intriguing and influential findings of transcultural psychiatry: that schizophrenia appeared to have a shorter course and favourable recovery rates outside the Western world. The article engages with a wealth of research materials from schizophrenia and expressed emotion studies, and a variety of voices - clinicians, patients, families - which shaped these investigations. It also draws a comparison between this discussion of 'traditional' families as a beneficial environment for schizophrenia, and critical psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses from the middle decades of the century which focused on the reportedly extreme psychopathological potential of 'schizophrenogenic' family relations in the Western world. Analyzed through this prism, expressed emotion research constructed the Global South as a preferable, even romanticized, alternative to the Western model of family interaction. On closer inspection, however, this idealization of the traditional family involved a variety of essentializing and romanticizing ideas which reinforced the ever-present binary of the modern West versus backward Global South, and perpetuated the belief in the decolonising and developing world's cultural and intellectual simplicity.