Under Psychiatric Occupation

Abstract

What happens when categories meant to name suffering become instruments of erasure? This ethnography follows two lives on the South Side of Chicago: a woman navigating psychotic experiences, addiction, and poverty who writes to exceed the psychiatric terms enclosing her, and a community psychiatrist whose career traces the rise and fall of public mental health. It argues that the ongoing dismantling of community mental health and its replacement by policing, incarceration, and forced institutionalization constitute a single revanchist project operating through what I call psychocentric biopolitics – the governance of racialized populations through a pathologized psyche. Tracing how psychiatric and sociological subjection converge for both clinicians and patients in a therapeutic foreclosure that obstructs care beyond cure, the dissertation then turns to a grassroots movement for rebuilding Chicago’s public mental health infrastructure through the decriminalization, demedicalization, and democratization of care as accompaniment that takes each person’s irreducible particularity as its starting point. Out of this ethnography, I propose an aesthetic anthropology as an orientation attuned to practices of subjective subversion and what the late Lacan, addressing the decline of symbolic authority in “an era in which the Other does not exist,” called the sinthome – a singular psychic and social invention that sustains a life without guarantee, organized around that which does not stop not being written.