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Paper short abstract:

Psychological illness can lead to a legal residence permit when the suffering is certified by a medical professional. This paper delineates how the practice of writing these documents can interfere with psychological care practices on three different levels.

Paper long abstract:

For people without a legal residence permit visiting a psychological institution can be more than a strategy to cope with traumatic experiences: Clinics often emerge as locations for the negotiation of the residence permit status as psychologists write reports about their patients' psychological and physical health status. These documents can play a vital role in juridical asylum procedures, as they can significantly aid the process of obtaining a legal residence permit. During ethnographic fieldwork in a psychiatric outpatient clinic in Berlin, I observed how these psychological examining practices interact and interfere with classical care practices of psychological work on three different levels: on a temporal level, concerning the therapeutic moment in which the documents are written; relational, i.e. concerning the therapeutic relationship between psychologist and patient; and on an ontological level, as in this context two very different logics of practice converge: Juridical action follows a true/false deviation, whereas psychology does not know this binary mode of ordering. Besides I will outline how these writing practices are stabilized and converted into practices of helping and healing to reach meaningfulness for therapeutic action. In this context care points to complex politics and asymmetrical power relations, what Martin et al. (2015) name es "care's darker side." Are psychological certificates a form of care that "organizes, classifies, and disciplines bodies" (ebd.) as they silence the refugee's voice? Or is the writing of these documents even an emerging care practice within therapeutic work with refugees?