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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how residents and staff produce contested knowledges of care in a psychiatric halfway home in India. While gratitude and ethical care are publicly performed, secrecy and coercion shape everyday life, revealing lived experience as survival rather than reform.

Paper long abstract

Halfway homes are widely framed as humane, community-based alternatives to long-term psychiatric hospitalisation, positioned as spaces of recovery, autonomy, and reintegration. Despite these ideals, ethnographic fieldwork in a psychiatric halfway home in India revealed everyday care organised through disciplinary routines, constant surveillance, and coercive practices.

Drawing on ten in-depth interviews with residents and staff members alongside sustained participant observation, this paper examines how different forms of experiential knowledge about care are performed and negotiated within the institution. Residents publicly enacted rescue narratives expressing gratitude toward the halfway home in the presence of external donors and observers, emphasising being “saved,” and admitting that they did not desire structural change. Yet away from surveillance, they engaged in shared repertoires of secrecy, selective disclosure, coded communication, strategic compliance, and mutual warning to navigate coercion and protect one another from punishment.

In contrast, staff members articulated ethical commitments to dignity and therapeutic responsibility while simultaneously engaging in surveillance, moral policing, and coercion. While staff knowledge shaped institutional routines and care decisions, residents’ experiential knowledge remained institutionally invisible.

I argue that residents' lived experience in the halfway home does not primarily function as resistance or a reformist voice but becomes a practical tool of survival in the face of coercion. By foregrounding how residents' experiential knowledge contests the institutional power sustained through staff members' everyday practices, the paper raises critical questions about whose knowledge is recognised as legitimate in contemporary mental health care.