Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how mental health care provided at a NGO clinic in South India becomes a space for negotiation of resources, values and actors in which psychiatrists, families and patients confront their "crisis" and imagine possibilities in the domain of treatment and recovery.

Paper long abstract:

Indian psychiatry has gone through various crises to find its position and recognition within the society, the state, and the international community. Actively trying to disentangle itself from the colonial legacy of the asylum which still plays a stigmatizing effect on the population, Indian psychiatry competes with other medical systems in the healing treatment (Halliburton 2004) and struggles with the limited provisions provided by the state by enacting what Das and Addlakha (2001) call "domestic citizenship," a citizenship practice which sees the family as its major stakeholder.

Drawing on ongoing research collaboration with at a First Episode Psychosis clinic in South India, this paper analyses how mental health care becomes a space for negotiation of resources, values and actors in which psychiatrists, families and patients confront their "crisis" and imagine possibilities.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed