[Symposium 68] Rethinking Trauma: Cultural Models of Care Across Clinical Practice and Treatment Systems

[SY-68-04] Medico-Legal Recognition of Trauma for Asylum-Seeking Immigrants in Japan

*Selim Gokce Atici^1,2 (1. University of Tokyo (Japan), 2. Princeton University (United States of America))

Keywords:

cultural psychiatry,asylum,detention,evidence,trauma

This presentation examines how Japan’s undocumented immigrants who are awaiting deportation while living temporarily outside of detention because of severe illnesses conceive trauma from the lens of chronicity, relapse, and repetitive cycles that are aligned with the schedule of medical interrogations and the temporality of stuckness. Drawing on 18 months of anthropological field research in shelters, courtrooms, and psychiatric clinics, it sheds light on how trauma becomes an impediment for civic belonging yet also its condition of possibility. The Japanese case complements frameworks that link embodied trauma to evidentiary regimes of documentation and border-making. Finally, the presentation asks how medical practice intersects with bureaucratic processes, ultimately affecting the moral and political significance of testimony and evidence. This connection between conditions of recognition and cultural models of trauma underlines the specific contexts and relationships of care that enable the clinical recognition and social life of trauma.