Scandalization as double movement: the rehabilitation of psychiatric participation in counterterrorism

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between scandalization and transparency, over time. The paper utilizes Timothy Pachirat's work on the Politics of Sight and Jamie Johnson's work on scandals and the rehabilitation of violence, to analyze the double movement of scandalization. Scandalization first utilizes a revelatory framing of transparency—exposing violence or malfeasance to public knowledge and critique. But memories of scandals can subsequently be threaded into regulatory responses to harm. These regulatory responses conceal harm through compartmentalization and compliance with bureaucratic checklists, deflecting potential for future scandalization. The paper explores a historical chain of events relating to psychiatric participation in counterterrorism and national security. The psychiatric detention of dissidents in the Soviet Union once provoked an international scandal, leading to the introduction of codes of conduct within psychiatry which prohibited the use of medicine for reasons other than improving health. However, police–psychiatric collaborations have since been rehabilitated through these very codes and data protection legislation. Rather than precluding scandalized practices, scandals can be incorporated within a double movement—introducing reforms which rehabilitate harms in compliant form. Scandalization first employs tools of revelatory transparency, but can inadvertently produce concealment mechanisms over the longer durée, which rehabilitate harmful practices.