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This paper examines the diagnostic classification of PTSD in view of how traumatic experiences are perceived, articulated, and responded to in locally meaningful ways. Drawing on cases from Haiti (James 2016) and Indonesia (Lemelson, Kirmayer, and Barad 2007), two disparate social contexts that have both incurred deep suffering under acute political violence, I reflect on the applicability of the PTSD construct to cultural contexts that are different from the Western-scientific milieu from which it was born and became institutionalized. I argue that making sense of individual suffering requires close attention not only to the circumstances under which the traumatic experiences unfold but also to the ways in which individuals interpret and respond to their suffering. In this context, the PTSD category is but one of many cultural systems of meaning that provide a framework for understanding and responding to one’s pain. As such, uncritical and universal applications of Western notions of trauma that disregard locally situated experiences of suffering, its meanings, and culturally salient coping strategies run the risk of both misinterpreting behavior and prescribing treatment that conflicts with locally meaningful categories of understanding. Simultaneously, understanding traumatic experience necessitates a recognition of its critical relational dimension, not only because trauma often involves painful ruptures to social relations but also given the role that social relations play in healing processes. The implication of this is that psychiatric models that pathologize trauma and neglect the role that culture and social relationships can play in healing are insufficient for explaining and treating subjective suffering everywhere.

Dreams of the bounties born by distant lands are both fabled and fact, immanence and transcendence. Such fantastical imaginings can coax an individual toward an audacious life decision, and it is this enticing entelechy that lies at the core of this study. This project examines how the tangible possibility for a ‘better’ life articulates with the ascendence of female domestic labor migration from Ethiopia to the Arab States of the Persian Gulf. I explore how powerful desires of becoming a sovereign caretaker reveal the ethical projects undertaken by women in contemporary Ethiopia. In asking how such desires and failed aspirations for the good life map on to the psycho-affective realm, my work situates experiences of mental and emotional unwellness as a place of social and psychic mediation—that is, episodes of “sickness” reflect the precarious globalized processes of human labor exchange between regions of the Global South. I consider individual women’s narratives regarding their migration journeys, domestic work, and corresponding “sickness” as distinctive modalities of desire.I maintain that the mental illness and associated treatment discourses surrounding returned Ethiopian domestic workers are unique to a distinct social, cultural, and economic, ordering of contemporary Ethiopia. I argue that such broad generalizations based on western notions of classification flatten the lived reality of mental and emotional unwellness particular to migrant domestic workers. By valuing individually narrativized experiences of mental and emotional unwellness, my work reveals that “mental illness” is instead described by my interlocutors as “sickness,” and is specifically tied to experiences of ambivalent and ambiguous self-understanding and self-formation. By untangling the ambiguities and individual subjectivities present in the diagnosis and personal experiences of mental and emotional unwellness, this study illuminates how individual women recognize and sense what causes, c