Description
Since its formation in the 1970s, transcultural psychiatry has positioned itself as a discipline that delivers culturally sensitive psychiatric services to migrant and refugee populations. Yet its broader function only becomes apparent when we locate its roots in early 20th century so-called racial psychiatry. This discipline rationalized what was considered an epidemic of “nervousness” in the industrializing West by constructing colonized and Jewish populations as either more or less prone to “madness” as a result of their exposure to the stresses of modern, industrialized life. This paper will argue that transcultural psychiatry, like its predecessor, racial psychiatry, serves to render racialized populations as inherently more susceptible to mental disorder and trauma, and thus requiring specialized forms of intervention and care. Tracing the genealogy of transcultural psychiatry and exploring its current mobilization in the United States and Germany, the paper will scrutinize how its expert opinion can play a pivotal role in asylum and entitlement claims. As these entitlements are contingent on the successful embodiment of a mental disorder recognized by transcultural psychiatry, the discipline serves as a crucial component in a wider political economy of selective entitlement by making racialized subjects apprehensible as other and subjecting them to medico-psychiatric scrutiny and management.
