Diasporic Muslims, Mental Health, and Subjectivity: Perspectives and Experiences of Mental Health Care Professionals in Ghent

Abstract

The mental health of Muslims with a migration background in Belgium seems to be particularly at risk. Inspired by the work of Nikolas Rose on the question of subjectivity, our sociological research analyses processes of subjectification that occur within existing mental health services, and the subsequent “proper” subject of mental health that is created along the way. We focus on how mental health care professionals approach and construct diasporic Muslims in Ghent, a middle-sized city in the north of Belgium. The article consists of three sections. We first lay out how our study is grounded in the work of Rose and his attention to subjectivity. The second section presents our methodology, and the empirical material that grounds our analysis. In the third section, we apply Rose's approach to subjectivity to our empirical data. Our study challenged us to illustrate and discuss different aspects of the subjectivity dimension as explained by Rose, and to enlarge our analytical approach and identify a logic of cultural difference by relying on the work of Edward Said. We come to the conclusion that the work of Rose and Said allows a critical deconstruction of this binary dialectic between ontologically different categories of Self and Other, yet does not enable us to go beyond a negative appreciation of professionals in mental health care and to (re-)imagine a non-deterministic and non-dualistic framing of the human subject formation of diasporic Muslims.