On a hot dry day in the winter of 2006–2007, I accompanied a team of psychosocial workers to a village in the far north of Bong County to audit mental health interviews. Sitting in a dusty, narrow, blue examination room with a table, a few chairs, and an empty bookshelf, Agnes, the psychosocial counselor, looked down. Her typically tall and graceful frame was slumped, and her arms moved slowly and listlessly through her notebook and kit. She seemed far removed from her usual pert, optimistic professionalism—her eyes looked haunted and distressed.

It was a slow day, and few...

In September 2006, I climbed up and down the back staircases of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Monrovia after receiving a referral from UNHCR. I was looking for the authorities responsible for managing the implementation of trauma-healing and mental health services in Liberia, but at the senior levels of the WHO’s country offices, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW), and the few professional offices of psychiatry and psychology, no one wanted to talk to me. I was lost, embarrassed, and worried that someone was going to notice me and kick me out of the building. After hundreds...

In the first nationwide, postconflict community-based study of mental health in Liberia (Johnson et al. 2008), researchers found that almost half of the population, and two-thirds of self-reported ex-combatants, reported significant levels of PTSD symptoms. The same study found that 40 percent of respondents reported symptoms of major depressive disorder, 11 percent reported suicidal ideation, and 6 percent reported at least one unsuccessful suicide attempt. Moreover, researchers found that 14 percent of ex-combatants, and approximately 7 percent of the total population, reported substantial substance abuse.

As descriptive data, these pieces of information are helpful in gauging the breadth of psychiatric...

In the well-documented history of Western psychiatry, the concepts of trauma, PTSD, and the psychosocial have been so widely used that they have generated vernacular lives. In the next few pages, I draw a brief genealogy of the term “psychosocial,” which provides context for deciphering the space of intervention that was enacted in Liberia during the postwar period.

At the turn of the twentieth century, social scientists used the word “psychosocial” in two ways. First, it denoted processes of social functioning and psychological integration in social milieu (with all the attendant historical and evolutionary theories that might be anticipated from...

In many ways, GBV projects in Liberia were unlike the programs described in the last chapter, which explicitly targeted mental health, trauma healing, or psychosocial rehabilitation. Although both classes of humanitarian aid activities shared “technologies of the self” like individual counseling, support groups, and community-based education initiatives, GBV interventions contrasted sharply with the disorganized polymorphism of psychosocial intervention. First, GBV interventions were highly efficient, coordinated, and well funded. They tended to support large, highly trained Liberian national staffs who were carefully monitored by experienced expatriate managers. Second, GBV operations were effective: they were active, mobile, well documented, and bureaucratically transparent....

One late night in Foya Town, near the Sierra Leonean border, I was laughing with two young Liberians, Joseph and Sumo, in the front room of our hotel. For over an hour, they had been mimicking the costumes, behaviors, and rollicking prayers of Monrovia church ladies, and each outdid the other as they took on church after church.

Then an older, unkempt, sullen man came in to the main area buy some sweets from the small canteen and bar. He did not greet us, kept his head down, and projected a silent attitude of lethal predation.

I noticed that Joseph,...

In this chapter, I widen the lens from a study of specific mental health and psychosocial interventions to examine how mass human rights interventions worked as a form of social engineering in postconflict life. In the ethnographic narratives that follow, I focus on the strategies deployed to reengineer public sentiment en masse: media and advertising campaigns, public spectacles like traditional healing rituals and the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and community-based human rights training. Through these efforts, Liberians and international NGOs participated in a project of producing “normal” peace subjectivities, or what Michael Herzfeld called “producing sameness” (1992, 75).

Although...

In the years immediately following the end of the war, newly minted trauma-healing and psychosocial counselors appeared to be running amok, administering counseling willy-nilly without credentials, oversight, or supervision. Critics, with or without evidence, believed that this constituted a real crisis. First, they worried that “irresponsibly provided” trauma healing and psychosocial counseling would either have no effect on vulnerable populations seeking real aid or have harmful effects. Second, they believed that ineffective trauma programs wasted humanitarian resources. Third, as described in Chapter 2, they believed that the lack of coordination among trauma-healing programs and their chaotic implementation constituted a direct...