Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I describe frontline social and mental healthcare work as the business of temporarily stabilizing an otherwise unstable world. I argue that, if they do so successfully, frontline workers appear as risk experts, enabling them to determine the limits of the state vis-à-vis citizens.

Paper long abstract:

In the Netherlands, policy makers take so-called ‘care-avoiders’ to be both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’: at risk because they are prone to suffering and a premature death, and risky because they cause nuisance and may turn violent towards the people around them, including professionals. In 2023/2024, I conducted fieldwork in a team of social and mental healthcare workers charged with convincing care avoiders to accept the care available to them. I found that, while trying to seduce, pressure, and coerce their clients into becoming care accepting citizens, they were wary of the tendency to pathologize them. Instead, they presented clients as the victims of a ‘careless’ and ‘out of control’ system, while theorizing the use of violence by both care avoiders and police and healthcare professionals as the logical consequence of that system. In fact, reading the situation as such, they spent much of their time urging fellow frontline workers to become 'caring' and 'controlling' professionals, while also trying to undo the current mental healthcare system in favor of a system rooted in existing ecologies of care. In this paper, I describe these efforts of changing citizens and the system to analyze frontline work as the business of temporarily stabilizing an otherwise unstable world. I argue that, if they did so successfully, frontline workers achieved a sense of authority over their clients and fellow frontline workers, and, moreover, on risk itself, enabling them to put into practice what they thought were the proper limits of the state vis-à-vis citizens.