Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the felt need to escape the clinic among military mental health care providers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to theorize the forms of exposure such escapes imagine and enact.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the felt need to escape the clinic among military mental health care providers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to theorize the forms of exposure such escapes imagine and enact. Exposure, particularly through the idiomatic experience of leaving the relative control, safety and professional routine of the clinic, features as a key ethic and therapeutic register in the practice of care among deployed military psychologists and social workers. Exploring how providers are enjoined to get out of the clinic through so-called “walkabouts” – improvised ambulations around base used to establish para-therapeutic contact with soldiers through casual encounters in the dining hall, gym, and out in the motor pool – I show how provider exposure is a critical way of doing the work of war that expands the reach of “the clinic” across the topography of counterinsurgency, and informalizes and disperses the patient encounter across the spaces and interactions of deployed military life. I theorize provider exposure as a “point of contact,” a concept I use to highlight the range of symbolic and bodily vulnerabilities as well as the therapeutic and professional opportunities that can unfold in the raw encounters of the walkabout. Points of contact are conditioned by the historical and material particularities of counterinsurgency, the institutional stigma of military mental health, and the professional anxieties of care providers of the officer class as they navigate the division of labor and hierarchy of power that separate them from enlisted soldiers.