Paper short abstract:

Based on field research in inpatient psychiatric care, I adopt the lens of sensory ethnography to the experience and treatment of psychiatric illness. I discuss, how encounters of "resonance" beyond dualist, medicalized concepts of illness create fleeting moments of care within austere institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in an inpatient psychiatric clinic in Switzerland, I examine different practices and ontologies of care, experienced and navigated within institutionalized care. I trace sometimes competing notions of personhood, wellbeing and illness among different actors (patients, medical staff, spiritual care, movement therapists). I illustrate how some patients associate healing with interpersonal relationships, being listened to and “being seen”. This need for social resonance can be at odds with different aspects of institutionalized psychiatry – often medical ontologies that prioritize a dualistic, biochemical model of health. Similarly, institutional hierarchies can degrade multisensorial, spiritual, embodied therapies such as art and movement therapy as mere “pastime” or subsume them as “unspecific therapies”. Adopting a phenomenological perspective based on sensory ethnography, I illustrate how different professional ontologies of care and wellbeing co-exist within clinical settings and how interpersonal resonance, as well as therapeutic human-nonhuman-relationships emerge in sometimes unexpected settings. In order to grasp the ephemeral, I examine vignettes from the field through the lens of spatiality and temporality. I discuss, how alternative, sometimes hardly visible encounters of care emerge at the margins of a scarce institutional landscape that is exceedingly marked by austerity and shortage of staff. Thereby I complicate the picture of the biomedically dominated psychiatric clinic by illustrating, that healing is not an isolated biochemical phenomena, but a lived experience that involves embodied, affective and societal dimensions. I propose an extended notion of therapeutic “resonance” that includes also human-nonhuman-relationships such as human-animal encounters, architecture, atmosphere, natural environments and spiritual practices.