Abstract

This article contextualizes adjustment disorder as an intelligible cultural response to structural violence and moral breakdown in postsocialist transition rather than an individual pathology. It draws on ethnographic field work and a detailed case study of Petra, a Slovenian woman who lost stable employment during economic restructuring and subsequently developed paralysis which led to her adjustment disorder diagnosis. Through the analysis of the discrepancies between psychiatric and “patient’s” explanatory models, illness narratives, and healing practices this case demonstrates that adjustment disorder represents a moral and relational rupture within a transformed social reality where the severing of social solidarity and reciprocal belonging shows correlation in contributing to both psychological distress and physical symptomatology. The article proposes utilization of the concept of social defeat as an analytical framework for the mental health practitioners, allowing them to explore, understand, and incorporate social, cultural, and historical contexts in which adjustment disorder is embedded in the postsocialist region. The study demonstrates how standardized mental health treatment alone proved insufficient without restoration of social participation and community reintegration, highlighting the necessity of culturally informed treatment/therapeutic approaches. Culturally informed treatment guidelines are proposed that are centered on the collective part of the self, utilizing language-based interventions grounded in Slovenian grammatical structures to encode therapeutic relationships and healing.

Keywords

adjustment disorder, mental health, postsocialism, social defeat, structural violence, Slovenia