Psychiatry, Disaster, Security: Mediterranean Assemblages

This article traces the development of a transnational psychiatric collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists in Turkey and Israel in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork in sites across the earthquake region, the project on which this article is based is concerned with how the Turkish mental health professionals who responded to the earthquake struggled to improvise a therapeutic response that could address the scale of psychological suffering precipitated by the earthquake. This article considers the development of a specific intervention in order to examine, first, the striking adaptability and mobility of these forms of psychiatric expertise and, second, their distinct capacity to draw together two divergent contexts-one characterized by the effects of a destructive seismic event, the other by a lasting politics of colonial occupation-into a common technical, psychiatrically constituted space. Tracing these transnational entanglements will offer a means for understanding the conditions of possibility for the circulation of medical expertise in the region and, with it, emerging transregional arrangements of psychiatry, disaster, and security.