Part of the Conference »Madness – Fighting for Justice in Mental Health« (25-27 November 2022, Berlin), organised by Disruption Network Lab.
The panel discusses the processes of decolonising Western and Eurocentric notions of psychiatry in the light of the discussion about Mental Health in Conflict Zones. It puts focus on the various challenges to mental health provision during a war conflict and discuss strategies for survival in and outside of conflict zones. The panel further discusses the structures of support that are being built after a conflict, again in conflict zones themselves and outside of them. Furthermore, it emphasizes the translation of traumatic experience and the need to overcome purely Western notion of medicine in a cross-cultural setting, and discuss the relationship between mental illnesses and cultural, socio-economic and political contexts. This highlights the need to recognise other systems of knowledge and emotional experience and expression and it looks into the possibilities of decolonising psychiatry in order to dismantle racism, especially when approaching non-western survivors in the mental health care sector.
In her talk, Lamia Moghnieh draws her conclusions from several ethnographic and archival cases in Lebanon and other MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) societies. Inspired by the science-fiction style of the black feminist writer Octavia Butler, Moghnieh looks at the politics of trauma, grief, and resilience in these geographies, while drawing parallels to the ways in which we survive and recover from violence, and the ways in which we are expected to do so by psychiatric, humanitarian and state institutions. In order to do so, she tries to move beyond the binary of trauma/resilience, towards paying more attention to everyday forms of survival, adaptation and rebuilding during war, economic and ecological crises, in times when “the world as we know it” is falling apart.
Reima Maglajlić talks about distress caused by political conflicts with a focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). She will focus on two aspects. She first provides an overview of professional and experiential responses to distress caused by political conflicts in BiH. Second, she provides a brief summary of the findings from two co-produced qualitative studies on experiences of distress caused by the war in BiH. The studies are novel in drawing their inspiration from the interdisciplinary field of Mad Studies, which prioritises social understanding and interpretation of madness and distress, as well as emphasises experiential knowledge, both of distress and of the conflict-affected geographies. The talk places particular focus on why access to justice is important for people who experience distress, both in conflict-affected countries and elsewhere, and on the types of support that people with lived experience reported to value the most.
In his talk, Donato Zupin addresses the systemic racism against migrants and ethnic minority groups in psychiatric institutions. He gives his local perspective from Trieste, Italy, to clarify some aspects of this phenomenon. Since the 1970’s, Trieste has been known for the radical deinstitutionalization processes, kick-started by Franco Basaglia, which take a freedom-first social-rights based approach to mental disorders. The city is also a key point of the Balkan Route and hosts some of the strongest anti-immigrant political movements. In his talk, Zupin addresses the cultural contradictions in his work as a coordinator of the Working Group on Migration of the Mental Health Department, where he has had the chance to observe how public institutions and NGOs interact when concepts such as mental health, migrations, solidarity, and social control come into play.
