Research on mental disabilities has ushered in a shift from disease-centered to patient-centered inquiry. This paper employs mental disability as an analytic tool through which to explore the relationship between colonial carceral institutions and the people in late nineteenth-century Egypt. The study examines nineteenth-century citizen petitions from the National Archives in Egypt to tell the history of mental disabilities from the perspective of patients’ families. Viewed as counter-narratives to the institutional histories in asylum reports and government correspondences, these petitions reveal the experiences of the families of patients confined at the ‘Abbāsiyyah Asylum. The research aims to answer the question: How did Egyptians accustomed to home care and traditional treatments respond to the state’s referral of mentally ill family members to the asylum? The paper centers the experiences of patient’s families within the historical enquiry on colonial asylums and demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of the psychiatric encounter and the negotiation and resistance strategies deployed by actors in this encounter. Uncovering the voices of family members, however fragmented, is but one of the ways in which historians can ensure that the family remains an integral part of disability studies. As central parts of the process of discharging patients from the asylum, the petitions reveal how families contested the confinement of family members and how they sought, alternatively, to treat them at home. The citizen petitions cited in this study demonstrate that families were not merely passive recipients of the asylum’s confinement of their relatives, ultimately challenging their institutionalization and seeking to take back control over their care. They provide valuable insights into the ways families deployed their own agency in interpreting and negotiating the legal systems enforced by the state. They also uncover the range of emotions, from anxiety and concern to fear and hope, intertwined with the institutionalization of relatives with mental disabilities in late nineteenth-century Egypt. This research demonstrates the wealth of information that may be garnered from historical sources such as petitions. By demonstrating the potential of these sources for revealing familial responses to institutional confinement, this paper suggests new paths of engagement with disability studies. It further acts as a call for the greater exploration of similar sources and the voices they represent, as well as for an interrogation of the manner in which they embody a wider resistance to colonial institutions.