Ethnographies of new clinical encounters: immigrant’s emotional struggles and transcultural psychiatry in Portugal

Abstract

Based upon two years of fieldwork in a mental health service for migrants in Lisbon, this article underlines how the psychiatric interpretation of the emotional experience of displacement, homelessness and (non) belonging in migrants can be influenced by colonial legacies. These legacies – incorporated, despite the best of intentions, as a constitutive element of diagnosis and treatment into the therapeutic practices of psychiatric counselling – pathologize experiences and behaviours of marginalized people of non-Western origins, reproducing discriminative attitudes and institutional racism.You came to me, Hippocrates, to give me the hellebore, giving credit to foolish men by whom my job is considered madness. I was writing about the harmony of the cosmos, the description of the pole and about the stars […] If you, convinced that I was insane, had made me drink this medicine, my wisdom would have become madness and your art would have been blamed as responsible of creating folly [Letter of Democritus to Hippocrates].1Fundamentando-se em dois anos de trabalho de campo num serviço de saúde mental para imigrantes em Lisboa, o artigo sublinha como a interpretação psiquiátrica da experiência emocional do desenraizamento, da carência de casa e da (não) pertença por parte dos migrantes pode ser influenciada por legados coloniais. Esses legados – incorporados, apesar da melhor das intenções, como elementos constitutivos do diagnóstico e tratamento nas práticas terapêuticas do acompanhamento psiquiátrico – fazem com que as experiências e comportamentos de pessoas marginalizadas vindas do mundo não ocidental sejam tratados como patologias, reproduzindo atitudes discriminatórias e racismo institucional.