Experiencing Political Migration: Intentional Oblivion, Depression, and the Unavailability of Collective Action
Author(s) Sergiî Shevchenko Publisher Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade Center for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, University of Rijeka Published 2024 ISBN 978-86-82324-56-0 Pages 14 Edition Square
Current theories of enacted and embedded cognition emphasize that cognitive processes occur through a person’s interaction with the environment: gadgets, notebooks, photo albums, other people, and communities. Traumatic interpersonal and political experiences entail conscious and unconscious changes in these relationships, which can be characterized medically as manifestations of mental disorders. Through a series of phenomenological interviews with political migrants, I show that painful political experiences are depressive experiences in their proper sense and not just ‘social contexts of illness’. Accordingly, mental health care professionals should take this experience into careful consideration and treat it as the first person account of mental disorder.