Experiments in Scale: Humanitarian Psychiatry in Post-Disaster Turkey |
| |
Authors: | Christopher T Dole |
| |
Institution: | 1. Department of Anthropology-Sociology, Amherst College , Amherst, MA, USA cdole@amherst.edu |
| |
Abstract: | ABSTRACT A massive earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999 generated an unprecedented mobilization of Turkish psychiatrists and psychologists to address the mental and emotional aftermath of the disaster. In this article I examine how these mental health professionals, swept up in a wave of humanitarian compassion, confronted the limits of their own expertise and struggled to improvise a therapeutic response that could match the scale of psychological suffering precipitated by the earthquake. Framing humanitarian and global health interventions as inescapably scalar projects, I explore the pragmatic and imaginative labor involved in making psychiatric expertise scalable, what I characterize as their “work of therapeutic scalability.” In doing so, I raise a series of questions about the psychological subject of disaster, the transnational mobility of technoscientific expertise, and the politics of both life and scale at play in psychiatric humanitarian intervention. |
| |
Keywords: | Turkey disaster earthquake humanitarian psychiatry expertise scale and scale-making |
|
|