The history of mental illness and psychiatry reflects the multiple ways in which colonial governments and modern states have defined both their national projects and relationships with their subjects. This paper will explore how mental illness was constructed and understood during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt. The study aims to interrogate the impact of nominal independence in 1922 on mental asylums and the mentally ill in Egypt. Focusing on the British colonial government as well as the newly-independent Egyptian state, the study explores differences in how both have appropriated mental illness and the impact this has had on psychiatric institutions and the patients institutionalized within them. As part of their administration of Egypt, the British systematically introduced specific doctrines for dealing with the medically insane. A psychiatric profession thus emerged similar to that in Britain, reflecting British medical practices and Victorian social values. Nevertheless, psychiatry in Egypt is much more than a foreign transplant and is also rooted in the country’s historical cultural beliefs. The blending of foreign ideas on mental health with Egyptian cultural traditions was part of a larger process in which foreign values at times merged with, and at other times were rejected in favor of, Egyptian beliefs and practices. With nominal independence came the “Egyptianization” of institutions previously administered by the British. One of the major changes that came with this independence was a transformation in the previous freedoms British doctors had enjoyed, and which enabled them to work rather independently. How was colonial psychiatry impacted by the growing nationalist movement in Egypt which resulted in nominal independence in 1922? What, thus, was the enduring legacy of colonial medicine and how was it reflected in Egyptian mental health practices? How did the management of the Cairo Lunatic Asylum of ‘Abb?siyya and the Kh?nkah hospital change as it was assumed by the Egyptians? Equally important, how did the treatment of the mentally ill differ from that which took place under colonial rule? The study will attempt to answer these questions by using archival material from both the national archives in Egypt and the United Kingdom, medical reports, correspondences, speeches, and journals. By juxtaposing British and Egyptian control over these institutions and analyzing the “Egyptianization” of the management of mental illness, this study will thus reveal as much about the differences between the colonial project and the Egyptian state as their similarities.