Lifeworlds in Motion: How Shifting Psychiatric Expertise Decenters Mental Health and "The Environment"

• In Event: Assembling Caring Geographies: How do Regions Care?

Abstract

STS scholars have discussed mental health as a relational phenomenon, co-constituted by bodily states, the mental health care system, “psy” knowledge and socio-material surroundings (Bieler/Niewöhner 2018; Bister et al. 2016; Duff 2016; Fitzgerald et al. 2016). The provision of care, moreover, has been analyzed as being emplaced (Ivanova et al. 2016; Söderström et al. 2016).
In this presentation I will discuss how mental health care practices shift when being confronted with people’s constantly changing lifeworlds. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects of mental health care infrastructure in Berlin, Germany, the empirical data mainly derive from participant observation in community care facilities, Home Treatment teams and the public administration as well as iterative go-alongs with mental health care clients.
I will analyze how psychiatric expertise travels from the clinic to people’s homes and how mental health care clients’ movements and subtle transformations of whole neighborhoods pose challenges for Community Psychiatry. In the entanglement of both places – the clinic and the home – psychiatric expertise is especially confronted with knowledge and place making practices that come from other than the traditional “psy” sources, which marks a decisive difference to hospital practices. Community Psychiatry tries to stabilize their clients’ contexts by conceptualizing their clients as well as environments as static, getting under pressure in a city in motion. Overall, I conceptually reflect on mental health and ‘the urban’ as entangled, relational phenomena that both need empirical attention – thereby refraining from an a priori divide of city and countryside.

Author

• Patrick Bieler, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin