ORCID
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8355-7490
Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2020
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation examines how frontline clinicians working with psychiatric patients in Berlin, Germany – both in the community and in the hospital – are often overworked, underpaid, and struggling against the temporal demands of a system that prizes efficiency and efficacy. I theorize how clinicians in this context explore alternative practices dependent on a different kind of accounting: positioning crisis not as a diagnostic rupture that must be rapidly resolved, but rather as contingent, socially embedded trauma that requires continuous and flexible care. These actors understand their work to be marginal and precarious, but their practice demonstrates the valuing of a different psychiatric personhood; one in which crisis is a rupture of possibility, not a deviance to be quelled. Building on feminist critiques of care work as a potentially exploitative situation in which marginal actors are engaged in emotional labor, the dissertation interrogates how precarity can be more complexly understood as the culmination of historical and contemporary ruptures. I argue that by considering "crisis" as a heuristic and set of practices, what seems like precarious labor can mark a meaningful socio-historical claim for participants who are caught up in the work of attending to such ruptures. I theorize the way caring during moments of crisis becomes a reconfiguration of risk; one in which future outcomes are variously anticipated in the present according to divergent views of uncertainty. These encounters must be constantly discerned, negotiated, and revised amid changing social and economic relationships.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Rebecca Lester
Committee Members
John Bowen, Talia Dan-Cohen, Kim Hopper, Joerg Niewoehner,
Recommended Citation
Cubellis, Lauren, "Anticipating Crisis: Risk, Cost, and Care in German Psychiatry" (2020). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2176.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/2176
Included in
Psychology Commons, Public Health Education and Promotion Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons