ArticleCulture, medicine and psychiatry2021
"Asylum is the Most Powerful Medicine": Navigating Therapeutic Interventions in Limbo.
Article in Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- The psychological impact of spending a prolonged time awaiting asylum.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Pooled it
- Therapy-facilitated integration responsibility: qualitative interviews with refugee psychotherapy clients in Germany.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- The voices not heard: thematic analysis of asylum seekers' explanatory models of mental illness as elicited by the Cultural Formulation Interview.BJPsych open · 2025Article
- Asylum seekers and the role of the acute care physician.Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians open · 2024Review
- (Over)crowded house: exploring asylum seekers' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic while living at accommodation centers in Sweden.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Living a frozen life: a qualitative study on asylum seekers' experiences and care practices at accommodation centers in Sweden.Conflict and health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research among asylum seekers in the Midwestern United States, this article investigates how a profound sense of limbo informed the use, meaning, and experiences of psychotherapeutic interventions, namely psychiatric medication and psychotherapy. In doing so, the article brings into dialogue a consideration of temporal and spatial uncertainty as a key feature of refugee distress, on the one hand, and attention to the subjective experiences of mental health care, on the other. Asylum seekers used therapeutic interventions and found them meaningful in the multiple ways these modalities help claimants endure the asylum process. Yet, ultimately, because they identified the unjust, protracted asylum system as the primary locus of their distress, asylum seekers perceived therapeutic interventions to be limited in their ability to assuage their suffering. In this context, legal status was often understood as the most effective form of healing. Thus, a sense of limbo was often both the impetus for using mental health care and the reason for its perceived limitations. My analyses have implications beyond the context of political asylum, underscoring how attention to temporality is important to better understanding the use and experience of mental health care more broadly.
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Registered trials
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