Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on 1) how the therapeutic community model that British psychiatrists developed to care for the psychiatric casualties of World War II travelled via The Netherlands to Rwanda and 2) which adaptations were made to meet the needs of respectively refugees in the Netherlands and inhabitants of Rwanda traumatized by contemporary wars. In England the new treatment developed out of a particular constellation of humanitarian ideology, wartime necessity, psychoanalytic insights and open minded pragmatism. What were the constellations of factors underlying the introduction and adaptation of the British therapeutic model in the form of respectively clinic-based and community-based sociotherapeutic care in the Netherlands and Rwanda? What in particular were the creative imaginations that informed this care in the specific social, political and legal circumstances where it has been provided? How does sociotherapy compare with the globalized psychiatric approach to trauma, its crisis rhetoric, and its in- and exclusion?