Organizing Norwegian Psychiatry: Security as a Colonizing Regime

Abstract

The terrorist attack of 22 July 2011 shocked the Norwegian nation. For most Norwegians the attack was unexpected. What threatened to become a national trauma was quite successfully brought within the language and legal procedures of democratic society. The terrorist event, however, exposed some essential dilemmas of psychiatric treatment regimes that had not formerly been brought into public debate in Norway. The terrorist court case pointed to some limitations of the diagnostic apparatus' approach to the question of the terrorist's rationale and his possible mental disorder. The court case exposed how medical, moral, and political aspects were intertwined in the classification of the terrorist act and the terrorist's mental state. This chapter focuses on certain critical events preceding the terrorist attack and the subsequent court case in 2012. The chapter does not analyse the Breivik case but focuses on some developments and tensions in psychiatry that were exposed by this case. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how psychiatry-as a social system of practice-is a domain that is becoming more critical in the current risk society. We could even regard current transformations of psychiatric treatment regimes as diagnostic of crucial social processes linked to securitization, risk, accountability, and managerialism. Trauma-as an unpredicted and uncontrolled violent event-occupies a central defining role, as the unthinkable and impossible risk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)