Fanny Justine Marie Teissandier

This project asks how public psychiatric services for asylum seekers in Paris operate as part of the French state’s moral mandate to provide immigrants with “material conditions of welcome” that include housing, an allowance, and access to medical care. By providing access to psychotropic medications and, to a smaller extent, psychotherapy, psychiatric services for immigrants attempt to palliate the suffering that results from the shortcomings of the housing component of the “material conditions of welcome” and the violence of the immigration system. My research will examine the use of psychiatric drugs to care for migrants who are caught in the legal limbo of the wait for their asylum hearings, and the ambivalent feelings of medical and social workers delivering such treatments. In doing so, I will explore how mental health providers may interpret racism as experienced within state institutions (such as those of the immigration system) and wider society as a cause of migrant suffering that can be alleviated through psychiatric care. Additionally, I will investigate the mobilization of medical proofs of harm in asylum court hearings to legitimize asylum claims.