Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the families of forensic patients, this paper considers the stakes and complexity of negotiating narrative authority for experiences centred around other people’s suffering, both through severe mental illness and through violence that has resulted in death or serious injury.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on my experience as the daughter of a forensic patient planning to research the experience of other family members of people institutionalised after serious violent crimes that occurred during psychiatric episodes.

The Covid-19 crisis brought to the fore how systemic uncertainty undermines mental health. However, mental illness resulting in serious violent crimes continues to be understood as detached from systemic issues, in its causes and how its impacts refract into society beyond the impact on the primary victim(s). People requiring institutionalisation after violent crimes remain outside the scope of debates relating to wider social and economic issues. The stigmatisation of their families precludes these wider implications from being understood, with a dearth of academic research focused on families of forensic patients (Robinson et al. 2017). However, a bricolage of literature on adjacent experiences - the secondary victims of violent crimes, the families of psychiatric patients and families/carers of incarcerated people - trace patterns through which mental illness, poverty and other forms of socially-constructed inequalities intertwine and refract through generations (Condroy & Minson 2020, Davis 2012, Miller and Barnes 2015). Drawing on this patchwork and its omissions, I consider the stakes and the complexity of negotiating narrative authority for experiences centred around other people’s suffering – both through severe mental illness, and through violence that has resulted in death or serious injury – shedding light on the shaky foundations on which the truth of families has to be built, and the ramifications this may have for ethnographic research.