Drawing on the completely unsearched case-books of the Dromokaition Lunatic Hospital of Athens, this study explores the origins of the mental disorder of the Asia Minor refugees who were interned there after the end of the Greek-Turkish war in 1922, and brings to light for the first time their spatial relations with physical as well as mental dimensions of a two-fold trauma. On the one hand, the present research will attempt to investigate the trauma of war as well as the experiences of the refugees in Asia Minor that led to their personality disorder. On the other hand, it will illuminate the trauma of being refugee in the social, cultural and economic space of the Greek state that also led to their internment and the labelling of these refugees as mentally unstable. The suggestion is that the mental ill-health of some refugees was prompted or exacerbated by their refugee experience, as tied up with some hostile responses from Greek citizens. To explore the limits between sanity and insanity, these experiences will be presented in parallel with those of the refugees who were not interned in Dromokaition but were successfully settled in Greek society. Apart from the archive of the Lunatic Hospital this research uses the League of Nations Archives in Geneva (Switzerland) and other archives in Greece.
Mots clés : Refugees|trauma|madness|segregation|war
A104885GK