Palestinian youth engage with many criminalizing and/or pathologizing narratives and images of their experiences of political occupation. These narratives and images are produced by biomedical professionals, NGOs, and state agents(Nguyen-Gillham et al 2008, Marshall 2014). At the same time, western, psychological narratives of Palestinian youth rely on their representation as emotionally resilient heroes in the face of extreme hardship (Barber 2013). So, what might it mean to construct or conduct primarily transnationally-driven pediatric mental healthcare in the occupied West Bank, where emotional suspicion operates as a salient reflection of both Israeli state power and indeterminate Palestinian statehood, at the same time that western medical professionals attempt to shape a counseling culture using –and creating -- emotional hyperbole? Based on recent qualitative research in Palestine, this paper explores two child and youth mental health services programs in the cities of Ramallah and Nablus, Palestine. Always in relation to Israeli and western models of trauma and resilience, Palestinian mental health professionals negotiate a politics of occupation and sovereignty to reproduce/rethink/challenge the typing of Palestinian youth as emotionally deviant in diverse ways. By highlighting some of these strategies, the paper traces some of the local and global biopolitics in which Palestinian youth – either via public anger, mourning, or even joy -- first become “hailed” (see Butler 1990, 1997) as emotionally “other” in familial, activist, institutional, and public spaces. It then documents some ways in which pediatric healthcare workers engage and/or reframe youth behaviors, responses, and aspirations along such axes of possibility and impossibility of life course events; mobility and immobility; and participation in intra-statist and neoliberal economies.The data reveals the necessarily paradoxical use of western models of trauma and resilience for diagnosing, treating, and reifying Palestinian youth as emotionally deviant in response to both the local and global cultures and systems of which they are a part.