Family Trouble: Changing (Dis)Orders and Psychotherapeutic Interventions in Uganda

Abstract

The recent popularization of psychotherapy in Uganda, while reflecting a global trend, is also a response to the far-reaching political, economic, and social transformations the country has undergone since 1986. These have caused new forms of stress and uncertainty and triggered desires for new forms of sense-making and care, particularly among middle-class Ugandans who are struggling with lifestyle-related suffering and family conflicts. Psychotherapy in Uganda is intimately, but paradoxically, entangled with neoliberal capitalism. By helping individuals adapt to capitalist modernity, psychotherapists help to reproduce the very system whose ills they are treating. However, they also believe that psychotherapy can produce critical counternarratives and a new form of care that challenges conventional hierarchies, ideologies, and norms. Based on an ethnographic case study of a symposium on family therapy, this article investigates the complex position of Ugandan therapists as mediators of social change and translators of new forms of knowledge.