Mit Franco Basaglia und Frantz Fanon über die »Pathologien der Staatsbürgerschaft« nachdenken

The literature analysing the various forms of psychic suffering in migration is remarkably heterogeneous in its aims and covers many disciplines: from theories concerning “nostalgia” – as a specific nosographic category of those who leave their own land – to the various syndromes that have proliferated in the last twenty years (from the “Ulysses syndrome” propounded by the Catalan psychiatrist Joseba Achotegui to the “Italy syndrome” more specifically linked to East-European female migrants active in the field of care and domestic work ). Each time the task has been to understand the epidemiological distribution of mental illness, identifying its aetiological causes, and suggesting effective therapeutic solutions given the risk of “category fallacy” as described by Arthur Kleinman in the late 1980s . Each of the perspectives mentioned above – and others that cannot be examined here – has founded specialist areas of knowledge (cultural psychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, cross-cultural psychiatry), each with its own activities, in laboratories, public services and other clinical experiences, and not only in what we can loosely call the West. This article does not seek to reconstruct the theoretical and epistemological framework in which these areas of knowledge and these practices have come about, but rather – using a vocabulary that draws on mad studies (or disabilities studies) and is extended to a political approach of the “psy” sciences, such as critical ethnopsychiatry has done in the last years – to analyse the modality through which the most recent symptoms manifested by those who have experienced certain forms of radical mobility or enforced exile with a lack of recognition in the host country challenge scientific knowledge and oblige us to rethink treatment itself. In this framework a historicization of the symptoms is fundamental, if we are not to fall into the risks of culturizing Others and their suffering, which, Megan Vaughan has taught us, is an old colonial vice that lingers obstinately on.