Shaped by Systems: How Institutions and Intolerable Environments Shape 'Psychosis
- 1:30-2pm Operationalization and Madness: How Mental Healthcare Institutions Reproduce Social Alienation - Jack McEnroe, BA
- 2-2:30pm Observations Into the Shaping of 'Psychosis' Behaviours: When Intolerable Living Conditions Combine with Bad Discursive Communities to Shape Strategies of Disengagement and Secrecy - Adan Charles Richards
Operationalization and Madness: How Mental Healthcare Institutions Reproduce Social Alienation - Jack McEnroe, BA
My paper examines how mental healthcare institutions inadvertently reproduce the social alienation that defines the psychotic experience. It uses an institutional ethnographic frame, with influences from relational psychoanalysis, to argue that prevailing treatment paradigms may miss the relational core of psychosis by prioritizing operational demands of the institution. This framing opens space to imagine alternative models of care that center on relationality rather than administrative efficiency. The paper draws on influences from Goffman and Foucalt, as well as insights from my own clinical and research experiences.
Observations Into the Shaping of 'Psychosis' Behaviours: When Intolerable Living Conditions Combine with Bad Discursive Communities to Shape Strategies of Disengagement and Secrecy - Adan Charles Richards
This presentation reports findings from a PhD study examining the social contexts that shape the behaviours labelled 'psychosis', conducted through 70 hours of observational interviewing across seven participants at the Humane Clinic in South Australia. Using Social Contextual Analysis, a framework drawing on feminist, Indigenous, anthropological, and sociological methods, the research traces how intolerable living conditions combine with discursive communities that suppress disclosure, and how mental health systems reinforce and reproduce rather than interrupt that suppression. The presentation draws on detailed case examples to show that without this level of contextual observation, the shaping of 'psychosis' behaviours remains invisible and the behaviours themselves far less intelligible. Attendees will also examine how the structural conditions of this research, including its non-coercive setting and relational methods, were necessary conditions for collecting rich and accurate data, with direct implications for how practitioners and researchers design future collaborative work when talking to clients.
