A few weeks ago, I stepped off the metro at Glacière in Paris’s 14th arrondisement and walked into Sainte Anne’s hospital, where I had spent the better part of my fieldwork last year. It felt good to be back in a psychiatric hospital as an observer, not a patient. Walking through the gate was just… Continue reading Asylum
“Can you remember what you felt like when you walked through that door?” “No,” I blubber back. “You said you were feeling okay. It was just twenty minutes ago.” “I’m not okay,” I insist, through tears. “I’m not going to be okay.” It hadn’t been an easy day. I had a total meltdown over the… Continue reading Out of Sense, Out of Mind
8:00 a.m. – Breakfast 8:45 a.m. – Community Meeting 10:30 a.m. – Snack 11:00 a.m. – Group Therapy 11:45 a.m. – Lunch 1:00 p.m. – Visiting 2:00 p.m. – Activity Group 3:00 p.m. – Snack 4:30 p.m. – Walk (if approved by insurance and doctor) 5:45 p.m. – Dinner 7:00 p.m. – Visiting 8:30 p.m.… Continue reading Impatient Inpatient
“Here, everyone is an inappropriate admission. I don’t admit patients. I discharge them” – Psychiatrist, quoted in Rhodes, Emptying Beds. Before I had even met my treating psychiatrist, they were talking about my discharge. Someone from downstairs—that is, the part of the hospital that isn’t a locked psychiatric ward—came to tell me that I would… Continue reading One In, One Out
“He’s trying to figure out if he’s high or just psychotic,” I explain. I’m listening as a doctor a few feet down the hallway tells a middle aged man, “We’re worried that you’re hearing and seeing things that aren’t there, so you’re going to need to stay for a little bit.” I’m with a friend… Continue reading Auto-Ethnography
I haven’t blogged in a long time, thanks to a procrastination that my research in the mental health care system now allows me to label “apragmatism” (about which I am no longer “anosogosique”). Nonetheless, as twelve (12!) months of fieldwork in France comes to a close, I’ve been feeling an itch to write down some… Continue reading Mad Days 1: Souffrance Psychique
Perspective for those who observe mental illness, but for me, as a subject, this tree bore only dry and tasteless fruit. . . I have a chemical imbalance; I really didn’t feel those things. I have a chemical imbalance; I didn’t really experience those things. I have a chemical imbalance; I didn’t really think those… Continue reading Planes, Brains, and the Unexplained
