1st Edition
Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry Global Histories of Trauma
This book explores diasporic identities and lived experiences that emerge in global patterns of oppression and considers the consequences of treatment and cure when patients experience mental illness due to war, displacement and surveillance. Going beyond psychiatric institutions and conventional psychiatric knowledge by focusing on informal networks, socially contingent value systems, and cultural sites of healing, this book considers how communities utilize trauma productively for healing. The chapters in this volume consider the detection of mental illness and its treatment through claims to citizenship and belonging as well as denials of social identity and psychic experiences by institutions of the state. A multidisciplinary team of contributors and international range of case studies explore topics such as colonial trauma, feminized trauma, reproductive violence, military mental health and more.
This book is an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as scholars and those involved in policymaking and practice.
Introduction: Conceptualizing the Global
Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach
Part 1: Trauma, Globality and Death
1. Where Psyche, History and Politics Merge: Decolonizing PTSD and Traumatic Memory with Fanon
Roberto Beneduce
2. Obligatory Death in Wuhan: The Power to Decide who Died, and Therapies for those who Survived
Xiaowen Zhang and Jie Yang
Part 2: Global Surveillance and Trauma
3. American Exceptionalism and the Construction of Trauma in the Global War on Terror
Neil Krishan Aggarwal
4. Militarism, Psychiatry and Social Impunity in Kashmir
Saiba Varma
Part 3: Culture, Displacement and Healing
5. Healing the Sickness of Fighting: Medicalization and Warriordom in Postcolonial North America
Christopher M. Webb
6. Jinns and Trauma: Unbounded Spirits and the Ontology of Mental Illness in Pakistan
Sanaullah Khan
Part 4: Global Bodies, Logics and Clinics
7. Feminized Trauma, Responsive Desire, & Social/Global Logics of Control: A Dialogue
Alyson K. Spurgas and Elliott Schwebach
8. Reproductive Violence and Settler Statecraft
Elena Ruíz, Nora Berenstain, and Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba
9. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI): Cases/Experiences of Trauma and Healing
Crystal Han and Shinnyi Chou
Biography
Sanaullah Khan is an incoming lecturer at Brandeis University where he will teach medical anthropology after the completion of his PhD in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently also an adjunct professor in medical anthropology at the University of Delaware.
Elliott Schwebach (PhD, political science, Johns Hopkins University) is currently working as a DEI Consultant for Dr. Valaida Wise Consulting and teaching at Central New Mexico Community College.
"With a sophisticated grasp of the ‘psy’ disciplines across global contexts, Khan and Schwebach have curated an incisive and generative critique of the psychiatrization of trauma and the construction of 'mental health’ that should be taken quite seriously. Collectively, the contributions have profound implications both for how we understand the history of psychology and how we might imagine help, healing, and justice less rooted in structures and epistemologies of violence."
Patrick R. Grzanka, Professor of Psychology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
"An exciting and very thoughtful volume, which elegantly rethinks the trauma word, its meanings and practices on wide, global, American and intimate scales. This book’s finely rendered cases will be taught and taught again."
Nancy Rose Hunt, Ph.D., Professor of History, The University of Florida, author of A Nervous State (2016) and A Colonial Lexicon (1999)
