Experiments in Scale

Humanitarian Psychiatry in Post-Disaster Turkey

Bibliographic Data

ID4564346
AuthorsC Dole (0000-0002-6845-4178, Amherst College, corresponding author), Christopher T Dole (Amherst College)
Year2020
Volume39
Issue5
Pages398-412
Publication date2020-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMedical Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0145-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-5882
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01459740.2020.1755284
PMID32394758
OpenAlexW3025090192
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited48

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

Compassion · Framing (construction · Global mental health · Humanitarian aid · Humanitarian intervention · Mental health · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychological intervention · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Turkish · Engineering · Health and Conflict Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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