Starting in the 1930s, Palestinian families petitioned the British mandatory government demanding support with the care of relatives they deemed to be mentally ill. While certainly giving some insight into how families understood ‘mental illness’, what is perhaps more striking in these petitions is the way families strategically engaged with the mandate government, playing off colonial anxieties about political and social disorder – which were often deeply gendered in nature. These petitions thus allow us to understand Palestinian families – rather than medical authorities alone – as active in shaping the therapeutic experiences of mentally ill relatives, and moreover allow us to understand ‘mental illness’ itself as a generating a dense knot of hitherto overlooked interactions between colonial state and Palestinian society at precisely the point when relations between the two were most strained politically - suggesting the value of a medical humanities approach in understanding histories of colonialism in the region.