Abstract

PUSSETTI, Chiara. Ethnographies of new clinical encounters: immigrant’s emotional struggles and transcultural psychiatry in Portugal. Etnográfica [online]. 2010, vol.14, n.1, pp.115-133. ISSN 0873-6561.

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.

Keywords : anthropology of emotion; critical medical anthropology; ethno­psychiatry; colonial legacies; African diaspora.

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