SEEKING AND AVOIDING: ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP FOR BELARUSIAN REFUGEES

Abstract

This paper responds to an apparent public consensus about the need for psychological help for Belarusians who have experienced repression and forced migration. Using data from interviews and participant observation conducted within long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I examine various forms and meanings of psychological help as it was practised, understood and dealt with within the community of Belarusian political refugees who fled to Lithuania after 2020. The article provides an overview of heterogeneous psy encounters in the field, zooming in on two practices that were organised within the community. I argue that informal and community-based psychological help, as it was practised within my field, should be understood as a dynamic entanglement of practices, charged
with past experiences and current predicaments. The proposed approach allows us to see how so-called ‘psychological help’ can take various forms even within a relatively small community. Those forms can be entangled with different historical and socio-cultural contexts, state bureaucracies and relationships within the diaspora. The meaning of such help to its recipients, as well as their desire to resist psychologisation, should be taken into account by activists, practitioners, and community members.