Paper short abstract:

The obligatory psychiatric care system of the city of Berlin sets the framework for service provision in community mental health care. This paper engages ethnographically with the conjoined articulations of policy and care in these services as induced by accountability measures.

Paper long abstract:

In Berlin, public mental health care services in the community sector form part of the cities obligatory psychiatric care system. This policy mandates a certain variety of community care facilities with specified capacities every year. Welfare authorities (re-)assign places in the services to the clients annually via a standardized form, the so-called Treatment and Rehabilitation Plan. The form has been introduced in the 1990ies to insert principles of individualized care.

Based on an ethnographic study in community mental health care services in 2013, this paper highlights how policy and care are conjoined, that is mutually enacted and kept apart, in daily service provision. Building on material-semiotic theory within STS, I will argue that it is especially accountability measures, such as the Plan and electronic service documentation, which support a dominant conjunctive relation between mental health care policy and daily care practices. Finally I will suggest how conjoining policy and care through accountability significantly shapes what it means to care and be cared for in the spaces of contemporary German community mental health care.