Dwelling with Multiplicity: Negotiating Borders in the Lifeworld of First Episode Psychosis
Sites a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies March 11, 2022 Suze Berkhout, E. Mark Stern 2 citations
In first-episode psychosis care, clinical settings often reinforce diagnostic boundaries and narrow the understanding of patients' experiences. A collaborative art workshop, part of an ethnographic study, offered a contrasting space where the aesthetics of artwork allowed a fuller lifeworld to emerge. By engaging concepts of dwelling, borderlands, and lifeworld, the workshops countered the institutional and methodological structuring of psychosis narratives, revealing how cure, harm, and diagnostic practices intersect with mental disability. The experience and phenomenology of psychosis in the art workshops differed markedly from its construction in traditional clinical spaces, suggesting that creative practices can open up richer, less constrained accounts of mental distress.