Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey

by Christopher T. Dole

Overview

Living On centers around the unprecedented mobilization of mental health professionals in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999—a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Working amid unimaginable destruction and suffering, volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists would quickly improvise a makeshift response, offering thousands of survivors access to psychiatric care for the first time. Never before had there been such a collective expression of concern for people's psychological well-being.

Christopher Dole explores how this psychiatric response fashioned individual and collective lives far into the disaster's future. Based on research spanning two decades, from the earthquake to its twentieth anniversary, he considers how this convergence of geological activity and psychiatric expertise introduced novel psychiatric and psychological discourses into everyday lives of survivors, as it also animated new visions of self, society, and technopolitical promise. Living On not only offers insight into Turkey's transformations over the opening decades of the twenty-first century, but it also sheds light on a more general arrangement of disaster, governance, and medical expertise—one that increasingly characterizes our era of planetary ecological crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503642515
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Christopher Dole is Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College. He is the author of Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey (2012) and co-editor of The Time of Catastrophe (2015).

Editorial Reviews

"In this compelling ethnography of the long-term human consequences of catastrophe, Christopher Dole draws upon decades-long research to disturb and perturb what we think we understand about trauma, mental health disaster interventions, and the profoundly complicated intersection of human experiences of enduring social suffering with the vicissitudes of the humanitarian responses. Impressive and important!" —Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

"Evocative and nuanced, Living On offers an understanding of emerging mental health regimes and their integration into everyday life. Christopher Dole skillfully analyzes how Turkish mental health professionals transformed disaster into a psychiatric event, reshaping concepts of recovery and victimhood." —Salih Can Açiksöz, University of California, Los Angeles

"A memorably rich account of how a fast disaster became a multifaceted slow disaster with culturally transformative effects. Staying with the disaster over time, Dole's is a story in which the state is dramatically present in its absence and a story of how an expert community rapidly mobilized to provide emergency care, scaling up and refiguring itself in the process. The leading characters, though, are disaster survivors—people 'left behind' in the long wake of disaster." —Kim Fortun, University of California, Irvine

From the Publisher