Stories of Madness: Exploring Resistance, Conformity, Resiliency, Agency, and Disengagement in Mental Health Narratives
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Old and present mental health systems tend to emphasize mental health service users as passive recipients of psychiatric care, which suppresses the idea that people who experience serious mental illness are able to comprehend their own sickness and recovery and therefore engage psychiatric experts about their care. This dissertation seriously interrogates the ways in which those who experience serious mental illness become agential, resist some of the control mechanisms, relationships of power, and infantilizing rituals found within the Canadian mental health system, and survive abject circumstances. Drawing on my own autoethnographic experiences with psychosis and psychiatric hospitalization, as well as 10 interviews with mental health service users, I argue that narrative approaches to inquiry and a post-anarchist praxis can reveal and liberate our agential capacities to recover and live through madness that otherwise become less known through biomedical approaches to mental health research. I identify some of the porous boundaries between the livable and unlivable forms of madness, and explore the complex relationships between service users and their caregivers whose penultimate goal is to help us live a manageable life. I conclude by discussing the contributions of this dissertation and reflect on some of the practical needs of the current mental health system.
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Copyright © 2019 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.
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- 2019
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johnston-storiesofmadnessexploringresistanceconformity.pdf | 2023-05-05 | Public | Download |