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Keynote Speaker - Urhomelessness: Understanding Psychosis as a Person-World Experience (Hybrid)
Friday November 6, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EST
Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
What if psychosis was not only related to the social world, but also fundamentally constituted by both person and world? This presentation will offer a social-phenomenological understanding of psychosis as an experience that is constituted through person-world configurations. Predominant historical conceptualizations of psychosis have located the experience within individuals, often minimizing the relevance of social circumstance and context. A growing body of research has identified that many of the social and structural correlates of psychosis historically seen as its sequelae –including social marginalization, socioeconomic disadvantage, housing insecurity, forced migration, and urbanicity-- are better conceived as etiologically relevant risk factors. Drawing on phenomenological-existential, epidemiological, and sociocultural research, this lecture will posit that the social world is not only a determinant of psychosis but also a constitutive facet of the psychotic structure itself. In doing so, I will synthesize across four areas of theory and research: (1) historical accounts of the social dimensions of psychosis, including the institutional psychotherapy movement in postwar France that forms part of the framework for this conference; (2) phenomenological and transcultural research on urhomelessness as a unique mode of being-in-the-world characterized by profound lack of safety and foreclosed belonging; (3) the growing body of evidence for social defeat models of psychosis and structural determinants of mental distress more broadly; and (4) Brent Dean Robbins and colleagues’ work positing psychiatric diagnosis as a potential form of structural scapegoating that locates social pathologies within individuals. The lecture will conclude by considering the implications of this social-phenomenological and structural understanding of psychosis for contemporary mental health research and practice. In doing so, I will explore the possibility that conventional diagnostic frameworks, and the institutions built upon them, are not merely responses to extreme states but may themselves participate in the structural processes through which psychosis is constituted and sustained. These questions will be addressed in relation to contemporary discourse concerning involuntary intervention and reinstitutionalization in New York City.
 
Speakers
avatar for Sarah Kamens, PhD

Sarah Kamens, PhD

Editor, Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Sarah R. Kamens, PhD is a clinical psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on theories of mental distress, including phenomenological-existential approaches to psychosis and structural violence. Kamens holds an MA in Communication from the European Graduate... Read More →
Friday November 6, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EST
Student Dining Hall, John Jay College of Criminal Justice 524 West 59th Street, New York, NY 10019
  Keynote, Hybrid

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