Following a series of devastating earthquakes that struck western Turkey in 1999, psychologists and psychiatrists from across the country rallied to help survivors, as a vast network of international humanitarian mental health professionals descended on the region. Through this multifaceted response, psychiatry and psychiatric discourse entered into the everyday life of communities to an unprecedented extent—giving new meaning to individual suffering, taking part in familial networks of care, and emerging as a resource for both expressing distress and acquiring financial compensation. In this paper, I track the emergence of a series of specific psychiatric interventions as they were developed in and proliferated outward from the earthquakes’ devastation. In particular, this paper explores the divergent ways that these mental health professionals conceptualized sites of psychological damage, their struggle to formulate effective interventions capable of being administered across large populations, the forms of expertise they relied on to imagine the “social” as a site of intervention, and how each of these articulated within the massive international humanitarian psychiatric response that the earthquakes elicited. This analysis builds on recent scholarship in anthropology and science studies that explores the ways that large-scale disasters offer a unique window onto the political-scientific management of life and risk (Petryna 2002) and the ways that medical humanitarian responses to disasters serve to both globalize psychiatric categories of Western origin (Breslau 2000; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Watters 2010) and extend the legitimacy of new forms of globally organized power and transnational regimes of humanitarian governance (Pandolfi 2003; see also Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Barnett 2011; Bornstein and Redfield 2011).