Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ramifications of psychiatric treatment in displacement in relation to local understandings and practices of care in the refugee settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the refugee settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda, explores the ramifications of psychiatric treatment in displacement in relation to local understandings and practices of care.

Uganda hosts more than a million South Sudanese refugees fleeing a brutal conflict. One of the most neglected refugee emergencies in the world, the humanitarian response in Uganda has been strongly shaped by the framework of “self-reliance” and “self-care”, mirrored in the frequent prescription of psychotropic medication in the settlements Health Centres.

The globalisation of psychiatry, particularly in the Global South, has often been contested as a fundamentally neo-colonial project (Summerfield, 2013; Mills, 2014). Furthermore, the configuration of psychiatric medications as embodied and hyper-individualising tools of care entrenched in a neoliberal political economy has recently been outlined in the literature (Klein and Mills, 2017; Davies, 2017).

This paper shows that among South Sudanese refugees, notions of care largely translate in the possibility of providing and participating in community life and hardship. In individualising social suffering and in the severely impairing side-effects it causes, psychotropic medication critically undermines local practices of care (both given and received) for South Sudanese refugees suffering from mental disorders.