Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the role of psychiatric diagnoses in the moral project of making a good life.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Sydney, this paper examines the lived experiences on the boundaries of psychiatric diagnoses. Through an engagement with parents of "difficult" children - those who are neither considered normal, nor officially diagnosed - I have explored the role of diagnoses in the moral projects of making a good life.

In Australia, as in many other Western countries, we have seen an increased attention to mental health issues in recent years. This focus has almost exclusively been the domain of psychology and psychiatry. This paper argues that anthropology has important contributions to make in order to understand the broader cultural and socio-political context of mental illness and mental health. Taking the stance that we are both embodied and embrained in particular social and historical contexts, I examine how a neoliberal vocabulary, comingled with a psychiatric idiom of distress, is stitched into the fabric of everyday family life, reorienting the family towards a particular ideal of the good life. By sketching the challenges these families face, this paper grapples with the question of how the mechanisms of help are entangled with the same neoliberal regimes of truth which may be producing the suffering.