Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the 'trouble' of making space for mental health care within penal estates through research in a new unit for prisoners with serious mental illnesses (SMIs) in an English prison. The paper asks what 'hope' the experimental approach offers for improving care of prisoners with SMIs.

Paper long abstract:

There has long been concern that the de-institutionalisation of mental health care has been accompanied by a re-institutionalisation of those with mental health care needs within prisons (Dear and Wolch, 1987; Nickerson, 1985). Mental illness and well-being are frequently negatively impacted by experiences of incarceration (Crewe, 2011). Prisoners with serious mental illnesses (SMIs) are 'troublesome' (Philo and Parr, 2019) to prisons as institutions at a time when they are also troubled by overcrowding within a penal estate that has been slow to adapt to shifts in punitive regimes and changing approaches to mental health care. Prisons have historically sought to move out those whose mental illnesses mean they are unable to self-govern (Crewe, 2011; Foucault, 1977) in a way required by contemporary penal regimes (Duke et al, 2018). However, the growing numbers of prisoners with SMIs alongside austerity politics that has restricted or reduced capacity beyond prisons for secure care, are forcing prison authorities to consider how they can accommodate care for serious mental illness within the penal estate. In this paper I explore these enfolding spatialities of care and control (McGeachan, 2019) in a large reception prison in the North of England as the mental health care provider and prison authorities 'make space' for prisoners with SMIs. In doing so, I contribute to critical debates in geography and anthropology concerning the 'trouble' institutions both present and to which they are subject in the contemporary context (Disney and Schliehe, 2019) and ask what 'hope' this new approach might offer.

Paper short abstract:

This study explores the affective dimensions of the lived experiences and imaginative lifeworlds of people living with dementia. With collaborative storytelling, I capture the affective and discursive practices of everyday Home-making in response to the ever-changing biosocial surroundings.

Paper long abstract:

This study explores the affective dimensions of the lived experiences and imaginative lifeworlds of people who are close to death and who are still dwelling with their progressive and degenerative mental illness ¬— namely, those living with dementia. Living under such conditions of existential crisis, complex cycles of feelings, emotions, moods, imaginations, and joy are often exposed and expressed in the process of everyday ongoing attunements to their ever-changing biosocial surroundings. Nevertheless, there are neither generally accepted theories of these affective, embodied, and material practices nor social scientific methods of these bodily transformations from the view of those affected. By inviting them and their significant others to collaborative storytelling, I capture affective and discursive practices in the process of Home-making, not as abnormal and illusive but as constitutive of everyday life. I, in particular, portray the transformative and affective experiences of an individual living in the Home, who was expelled by his Orthodox Jewish family and community for his conversion to Christianity. Despite the fact that his imagination and hope of returning home while living in the Home are painful and traumatic, his capacity to affect and be affected by his social, religious and material landscapes opens a new platform of dwelling, and continuously create a dementia-becoming otherwise. Consequently, I reveal the on-going, emergent and respond-able processes of world-making, what I call 'an art of dwelling', within his illness affordance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the history of psychiatry in Geneva as the history of the creation of intimate and endogenic alterity, tracing the geographic movements of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of psychiatry in the context of the development of the European (neo-)colonial empires.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the history of psychiatry in Switzerland as the history of the creation of intimate and endogenic alterity, tracing the movements of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of psychiatry since the nineteenth century in the context of the development of the European (neo-)colonial empires. This discussion is thus at the crossroad between questions of alterity, kinship, but also boundary-making and geographic displacement. It seeks to explore spaces and articulations between the public and the private, between the household and healthcare institutions at the core of psychiatric functioning.

Through the history of institutional psychiatric spaces in Geneva, it asks: how are grammars of selfing and othering (cf. Bauman 2004) created through the historic and geographical movements of institutionalization and desinstutionalization in psychiatry? Through which productive and reproductive processes and kinscripts this form of intimate alterity is able to emerge? How are spaces conceptualized in order to organize such systemic distinction ?

Today, countries where deinstitutionalisation has happened are often subject to processes of re-institutionalisation through increase number of beds in housing facilities and forensic psychiatric facilities. The emergence of spaces such as Curabilis in Geneva illustrates such dynamics. It is thus time to interrogate the broader social determinants that lead to historical movements of institutionalization and desinstutionalization of psychiatric patients, as well as the links between psychiatric institutions, intimate kinship ties and power dynamics.