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.