Skip to content

Dwelling with Multiplicity: Negotiating Borders in the Lifeworld of First Episode Psychosis

Suze Berkhout, E. Mark Stern

Sites a journal of social anthropology and cultural studies March 11, 2022 DOI: 10.11157/sites-id490 (opens in new tab)

Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Ethnographic study Peer reviewed
Intervention collaborative art workshop
Keywords Lifeworld Phenomenology philosophy Psychosis Ethnography Context archaeology Psychotherapist Epistemology Social science Anthropology
Citations 2
Key findings Collaborative art workshops in first-episode psychosis care countered the diagnostic boundaries reinforced by clinical settings, allowing a fuller lifeworld to be experienced through the aesthetics of artwork.

Abstract

This paper explores intersections of cure, harm, diagnostic practices, and lifeworlds of mental disability within the field of first episode psychosis. Drawing on findings from a collaborative art workshop developed within an ethnographic study of first episode psychosis, we contrast the experience and phenomenology of psychosis within the art workshops with the construction of psychosis in traditional clinical spaces. Engaging concepts of dwelling, borderlands, and lifeworld within this context, we detail how the workshops countered the ways in which institutional and methodological structuring of narratives of psychosis reinforce diagnostic boundaries. In contrast to the clinical setting, a fuller lifeworld was experienced through witnessing the aesthetics of artwork that was created within the project.