DeZIM-Workshop Series 2023

/ Veranstaltungen, Aufzeichnungen & Rückblicke

Decolonizing Mental Health. On a Reflexive Understanding of Health and Suffering in Transcultural Research Contexts 

Key-Note Lecture & Discussion with Prof. Dr. Ana Antic and Dr. Lamia Moghnieh (Thursday, September 7, 6-8pm; open to the public) &  Workshop with Prof. Dr. Ana Antic, Dr. Lamia Moghnieh and others (Friday, September 8, 9am-4pm; application needed)

Key-Note Lecture & Discussion with Prof. Dr. Ana Antic and Dr. Lamia Moghnieh

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, Room 2094, September 7 2023, 6-8pm 

At least since the Covid 19 pandemic, global health has been a strand of discourse and research that has gained increasing attention. With the discourse primarily focusing on infectious and other somatic diseases, aspects of Global Mental Health often take a back seat, and the relevant health concepts have limited universal applicability. Yet, such universal applicability is too often mistakenly assumed e.g., by researchers, to compare psychological suffering transnationally, to quantify the extent of psychological distress caused by migration or to examine its influence on migration aspirations. Therefore, a reflexive understanding of health and illness is imperative in addressing experiences of mental suffering in transnational and/or migration research contexts. The thematic focus and goal of this event at the Humboldt University will be exploring the pitfalls, tracing the challenges and deriving solutions on how to overcome them in future research. 

Prof. Dr. Ana Antic, Professor of European History and Medical Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, will argue in her key-note that even research that explicitly questions the hierarchical and racist implications of contemporary, Western-influenced psychiatry can run the risk of essentializing cultural differences, environmental determinants and concepts of mental health and illness, and thus understanding them in a reductive and evolutionary manner. This has fundamentally affected perceptions and discourses about migration, and the relationship between migration and apthology. She will rely on lesser-known historical concepts and psychiatric practices from the Global South and Eastern Europe to show how such essentializing reductionism can be challenged and overcome. Together with Ana Antic, we will ask: To what extent are mental health conditions universally and globally identifiable? 

The second keynote by ethnographer Dr. Lamia Moghnieh will bridge the gap between theoretical considerations and (ethnographic) research practice and answer some of the questions raised by Ana Antic using Lebanon as an example. Lamia Moghnieh is a psychologist, social worker and anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen. In her dissertation she examined the puzzle of humanitarian psychiatry regarding the difficulty in detecting trauma of Lebanese communities after the July War in 2006, the invisibility of experiences of suffering, and the strong, national narrative of sumud, a kind of collective resistance, not only in terms of psychological resilience, that took on various nationalistic, political and economic claims and meanings. With her research on the transformation of the narrative of mental suffering through the competition for recognition with other communities’ experiences of violence such as the Syrian refugees, she makes clear why social and historical contextualization is particularly relevant in research on global mental health.

After the keynotes we invite the audience to discuss with the speakers and each other about the challenges outlined and solutions suggested. Moderation will be hosted by Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kluge. The event will take place in English. 

Event format: English language - open to the public - event of the two-part Workshop Series "Decolonizing Mental Health. On a Reflexive Understanding of Health and Suffering in Transcultural Research Contexts. 

Workshop with Prof. Dr. Ana Antic, Dr. Lamia Moghnieh and others 

Berliner Institut für Integrations- und Migrationsforschung, Möhrenstraße 40, room 408; September 8 2023, 9am - 4pm 

Particularly in national discourses on refugee migration, the mental state of migrants plays an important role in the development of social narratives, which are characterized by, among other things, a "naturalized association of >>traumatized<< and >>refugee<<." (Will, 2019) and the corresponding ascribed raison d'être. Research at the intersection of the topics of migration and integration with medicine, psychiatry, and psychology uses established international diagnostic inventories, scales, and standards to assess and, if necessary, address mental health burdens such as post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, or the individual's perception of stress. Similarly, such standardized tools are used to compare mental suffering transnationally and globally or to investigate its influence on migration aspirations. 

Such a standardized approach to mental states implies a psychiatric understanding of health and illness that creates a tension between the universal validity of human experiences of suffering on the one hand and their culturally different forms of expression on the other. Criticism of decontextualization and pathologization of human suffering through psychological or psychiatric diagnoses is especially prevalent in the field of critical psychotraumatology. 

The workshop with the speakers Lamia Moghnieh and Ana Antic aims to identify innovative, interdisciplinary ways of using de-colonial theories to inform one's own scholarly work and to capture de-colonial practices in fieldwork. Anne-Kathrin Will, ethnologist and associate researcher of BIM, will contribute with her expertise to a profound critique of the psychologization of residence permits, especially in Germany, and its consequences. With the workshop, we aim to provide insight into how concepts of contemporary psychiatry can be usefully applied in migration studies to understand the suffering of different groups of people in a global context, without either essentializing so-called cultural differences or letting them fall under the radar. In terms of conceptualizing and reflecting on one's own research projects, we aim to find ways in which socio-political conflicts can be contextualized rather than psychologized and how psychological experiences of suffering can be contextualized within historical and socio-economic marginalizations. 

Event format: English language – Maximum 25 participants – No fees – Master (M.A., M.Sc.) degree and research interest in global health required – We give the spots on a first-come-first-serve basis with preference to those participants who are planning to participate in the key-note session the previous evening and the workshop. – We aim for a balance of methodological orientations and disciplines. 

Registration:
If you want to attend please use the registration form until 15.07: [Registration form
Participants facing financial hardship may request financial support or travel and accommodation during the workshop. To inquire about possible support, please send an email to nora.kuehnert.1(at)hu-berlin.de 

Ana Antic is a professor of European History and Medical Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. She is a social and cultural historian of psychiatry and ‘psy’ disciplines, with an interest in the history of war and violence, decolonisation and the Cold War, as well as the relationship between Europe and the broader world in the 20th century. She is the author of Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the violence of the Nazi New Order (2017) and Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War (2022). She is currently leading an ERC project on the history of transcultural psychiatry in the context of decolonisation, Decolonising Madness, and is the head of the interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and the Mind. 

Lamia Moghnieh is a medical anthropologist and a mental health practitioner. Her research broadly looks at the interplay and impact of psychiatry on social understandings of self and illness in postcolonial and post-conflict societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA). She holds an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago, an MA in Psychology from the American University of Beirut and received her PhD from the University of Michigan. Recently she is affiliated with the University of Copenhagen.

 Organizing Team: Laura Hertner, Nora Kühnert, Simon Ruhnke (BIM), Judith Altrogge (IMIS), Julia Stier (WZB)