“Heal a Population Still Reeling from . . . Enslavement and Violence”

In the May 2023 issue of the prestigious journal the American Psychologist, Evan Auguste et al. published “La lutte continue: Louis Mars and the Genesis of Ethnopsychiatry,” a landmark scientific essay about Dr. Louis Mars, whose footprints are recognizable in the field of psychiatry for his exploration of Vodou in treating mental health in Haiti in the twentieth century.¹ Evan Auguste and I subsequently connected by telephone to discuss the prolific new contributions of the research paper. We followed up over email the same month for the Q&A, and the full interview was revised in February 2025. 

Dr. Louis Mars, son of the Haitian founder of the Bureau National d’Ethonologie, Dr. Jean Price-Mars, studied at the University of Haiti Medical School, receiving his MD in 1927. After his postgraduate training in psychiatry at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris and Columbia University in New York, he returned to Haiti in 1936 to become the only trained psychiatrist to practice at “Camp Beudet,” Haiti’s first psychiatric center.² In 1958 he was elected president of the State University of Haiti and received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Liberia, and he was appointed Haitian Foreign Minister by his former schoolmate, François Duvalier, in 1961. In addition to his scholarship, Dr. Mars’s legacy is physically recognizable at the Mars and Kline Psychiatric Center, Haiti’s only hospital for acute mental illness, created in 1959 by a collaboration with the American psychiatrist Nathan S. Kline. 

This conversation-essay is an internal look at Dr. Louis Mars’s impact in the field of ethnopsychiatry and provides an opportunity to extend his scholarship and increase his recognition in mental health–related fields. 

Websder Corneille: Do you have a more detailed account of Dr. Louis Mars’s early days as a psychiatrist in Haiti? In his struggles in this past immediate US occupation (1915–34) of the country? 

Evan Auguste: From my readings and interviews, it seems that Louis Mars was deeply pained by how those struggling with various types of mental illness were treated in Haiti, and he very quickly realized the limitations of Western conceptions of illness in the Haitian context. Dr. Mars, through his own readings and in the legacy of his father, Jean-Price Mars, had a deep respect for the culture and religion of Vodou and observed how it was intricately woven into the tapestry of Haitian life.³ However, it was broadly assumed by Western psychiatrists and psychoanalysts at the time that African peoples were incapable of the type of complex thought that made them worth psychological understanding. Within this context, Dr. Mars found a punitive infrastructure of imprisonment for those with mental health problems left behind in the wake of the US occupation and a field that was ill equipped to tend to the needs of Haitian people. It was in this context that Dr. Mars accepted the challenge of adapting and creating new nosologies of mental health to consider Indigenous African religion in this context of psychiatry at the individual and systemic levels. 

WC: Following the neuropsychiatrist Dr. Legrand Bijoux, mental health caregivers, prior to Dr. Mars’s return to the country, were Vodou priests, traditional healers, and freemasons.⁴ However, people believed in the beginning that Dr. Mars was not into the involvement of traditional and spiritual healing in the provision of mental health services. Have you encountered this viewpoint in your research?

EA: There’s a nuanced perspective there. From some readings, it seems that despite Dr. Mars’s respect for Vodou, he did not have the same adoration for Vodou that his father possessed, and in some writings he regards it with a level of elitism (in some cases referring to it as peasant superstition). It should be named, though, that even in this elitism, Dr. Mars was also emphasizing that such superstition revealed the complexities and intricacies of the human psyche in the context of Haiti’s culture and history. In that way, Dr. Mars was highly critical of both Western psychiatrists who dismissed Haitian vodou completely and of Haitian elites who sought to erase it from their history. He was also critical of Western writers who romanticized Vodou in ways that dehumanized the Haitian people. As it pertains to treatment, Dr. Mars also held a nuanced perspective here. He uplifted the clear evidence he saw of people achieving healing in the context of Vodou ceremony, while also clearly naming instances of individuals faking their experiences of possession. This nuance was clear; he believed that psychiatry, once grounded in Haitian culture, was necessary to contribute to healing within the broader context of Vodou via intentional collaborations between mental health and religious practitioners. 

WC: In 1966, Dr. Mars published his seminal book Témoignages I: Essai ethnopsychologique, in which he explored the role Vodou played in treating mental illnesses affecting many Haitians. Decades later, the practice hasn’t received much attention within scientists’ and caregivers’ work. Do Vodou misconceptions or a lack of scientific evidence play a role in this poor result? 

EA: I think that’s it exactly. In many instances, African religions, histories, movements, and practices are often not seen as ways of knowing. Rather, it’s that either they’re treated as things to be observed and dismissed as primitive or they’re universalized in Western language and made “valuable” by the academy. Even in the current day, Western psychologists have made billion-dollar industries incorporating aspects of Buddhism and other broadly Eastern faith-based systems into cognitive behavioral therapies. The ways that African religions hold both some of the earliest inquiries into the mind as well as some of the earliest rejections of European colonialism, land dispossession, enslavement, and White supremacy remains overlooked. African-centered psychology is among the first psychological disciplines to specifically articulate a praxis for psychospiritual and political healing rooted in various African ways of being. For those within African-centered psychology, Haitian Vodou is among the most valuable religious systems in how it has shaped history, created senses of identity, interconnected distinct peoples, and articulated a distinct theory of how the mind and spirit are linked. Science has often followed culture, and yet the White supremacist roots of the culture that articulated Western psychology and psychiatry could not bring itself to recognize such value in a Haitian religion.

WC: From your perspective and many others’, Dr. Mars rewrote the practice of psychiatry/psychology by coining the term ethnopsychiatry and even created the field. “Unfortunately, the significance of his contributions to ethnopsychiatry, ethnodrama, and the subsequent field of psychology has effectively been erased from the disciplinary canon,” you write in “La lutte continue.” How do you explain this silence about his work in the field of ethnopsychiatry? 

EA: As noted above, African and Black peoples have historically not been seen as the ones who create or hold theory and knowledge. Rather, they’re seen as things from which Western academics extract and produce knowledge. Despite Dr. Mars articulating ethnopsychiatry and putting it into practice, Haiti was not seen as a generative site for knowledge. 

WC: I agree with you. Even Georges Devereux, the ethnologist and psychoanalyst who is credited for the term ethnopsychiatry, had admitted in 1946 that Dr. Mars coined it in Haiti.⁵ Why do psychiatrists refuse to credit Dr. Mars? Should we see a bias or a pattern of epistemicide? 

EA: Reading over the history, it seems like clear epistemicide. There are general credits to him as someone who created the name, but none of the credit is given to Dr. Mars for playing such a key role in the rewriting of how psychiatry should be grounded in local culture. There’s a clear rejection not just of Dr. Mars but of Haiti as a place that can contribute on the world stage, despite having played such an indelible role in shaping history. 

WC: Another point is the fact that Frantz Fanon and Dr. Mars are contemporaneous, and they were both engaged with mental health through the lens of racial alienation, anthropological engagement, colonial pathologies . . . But contemplation of Fanon’s work on psychiatry has been increasing, mostly with the rise of postcolonial studies, while the attention on Dr. Mars’s work is different. Would you see a double standard here? 

EA: I think this has to do with the immediate political relevance of their works. Fanon’s work served as prophetic for many around the world engaged in liberatory struggle, from South Africa to the US to Palestine. His work met the urgency of the moment and helped shape generations of decolonial movement and helped people articulate the effects of colonial violence. Conversely, Mars’s work took place in the wake of occupation and sought to more effectively heal a population still reeling from generations of enslavement and violence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a renewed interest in his work as people are more intentionally seeking to wed their decolonial struggles for liberation with healing movements. 

WC: Dr. Mars had also played multiple roles within François Duvalier’s dictatorship regime, which is acknowledged in your essay but not with many details. Why this complacency? What could be the impact of such implication on his legacy? 

EA: We didn’t seek complacency as much as to lay clear a contradiction that was apparent among many of the Haitian intellectual class. By all that I’ve read, it’s not just that he tried to maintain a good relationship with [Jacques] Roumain; I cannot find anything to indicate they had anything other than a solid intellectual relationship as they regularly held dialogues on the negritude movement in Haiti together. In my opinion, and drawing from some of the contradictions I’ve been made aware of in my own family history, I believe that for many among the elite there was a desire to nation build and protect the project of Haiti, and political service was among the highest forms of these efforts. In the case of Dr. Mars, it seems trying to walk this contradiction is part of what led to his initial downfall, in that he found himself exiled, in part, for his constant advocacy for an improved mental health system in Haiti. 

WC: For someone who made significant contributions to the mental health field in the areas of research, treatment, and advocacy in the world, Dr. Louis Mars is not well recognized. How do you think we should celebrate him? Because you’re invested in the areas of Black liberation psychology, community healing, and critical justice reform, how does your work or personal journey relate to him? 

EA: I believe Dr. Mars is an ancestor, among many others, whom we should seek to honor and exalt. Today there are so many people seeking to effectively create models of community care that honor Indigenous traditions and don’t require incarceration. For a brief wondrous period, Mars had co-created such a model in Haiti, and this cannot be erased. In honoring Sankofa, we can build forward by reaching back and looking into such models and intellectual contributions. Moreover, we can continue this work. Since writing “La lutte continue,” I’ve had the honor of meeting Dr. Mars’s son, Louis-Henri Mars, who is doing the fantastic work of leading Lakou Lape, which at one point had been engaged in efforts to intervene on the rampant community violence in Haiti. Both father and son are evidence that we can create the types of relationships, communities, and societies that we want through commitments to liberation and our ancestral traditions. For my own journey, as someone trained in clinical and forensic psychology and someone who seeks to be guided by movement work, they have offered a path toward building the types of programs and interventions that can aid in our collective healing. Indeed, my work in codeveloping the Sawubona Healing Circle program for the Association of Black Psychologists and my recent edited volume on Black liberation approaches to forensic psychology honor these legacies.⁶

Websder Corneille is an adjunct lecturer of Haitian Creole language and Haitian studies and an incoming PhD candidate in French linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. In 2023 he founded the cross-cultural Haitian Creole Program to teach and promote Haitian Creole language literacy and culture in Indiana. He has lectured at Iowa State University and Martin University, Indianapolis, on behalf of the Indianapolis Public School or the Haitian Studies Association. 

Evan Auguste is an assistant professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He completed his doctorate in clinical psychology with a major area of focus in forensic psychology at Fordham University in 2022. His work examines how the United States’ history of anti-Blackness has shaped psychological realities both in and outside of the country’s borders. For his work, he has received numerous awards, including the Cultural Competence in Leadership Award from the Edwin J. Nichols Foundation and the Association of Black Psychologists President’s Service Award. 

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[1] Evan Auguste, Garrick Beauliere, Deborah Jenson, Joanne LeBrun, and Judite Blanc, “La lutte continue: Louis Mars and the Genesis of Ethnopsychiatry,” American Psychologist 78, no. 4 (2023): 469–83.

[2] See Louis Mars, “La psychiatrie au service du tiers monde (Psychiatry in service to the third world),” Psychopathologie Africaine 2, no. 2 (1966): 227–48.

[3] Jean Price-Mars was a prominent Haitian intellectual and political figure in the twentieth century. An ethnographer, he founded the Haiti Institute of Ethnology in 1941, and in 1956 he was elected president of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris.

[4] See Legrand Bijoux, “Évolution des conceptions et de l’intervention en santé mentale en Haïti,” Revue Haïtienne de Santé Mentale 1 (2010): 83–90.

[5] See Georges Devereux, preface to Dr. Louis Mars, The Crisis of Possession in Voodoo, trans. Kathleen Collins (Reed, Cannon, and Johnson, 1977), 7–10. Originally published in 1946 as La crise de possession dans le vaudou. 

[6] Evan Auguste, ed., The Carceral State, Forensic Psychology, and Black Resistance: “Let Them Not Be Forgotten” (Springer Nature, 2025).