Excerpts on Mental Illness

Goffman on the vicious circle of insane asylums – “… there is a vicious circle process at work. Persons who are lodged on “bad” wards find that very little equipment of any kind is given them – clothes may be taken away from them each night, recreational materials may be withheld, and only heavy wooden chairs and benches provided for furniture. Acts of hostility against the institution have to rely on limited, ill-designs devices, such as banging a chair against the floor or striking a sheet of newspaper sharply so as to make an annoying explosive sound. And the more adequate this equipment is to convey rejection of the hospital, the more the act appears as a psychotic symptom, and the more likely it is that the management feels justified in assigning the patient to a bad ward. When a patient finds himself in seclusion, naked and without visible means of expression, he may have to rely on tearing up his mattress, if he can, or writing with faeces on the wall – actions management takes to be in keeping  with the kind of person who warrants seclusion.” P.306, Asylums

Gregory Bateson on the schizophrenic process – “It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, the schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony – a death and rebirth – into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in this course is largely steered by endogenous process.

                In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only the final and natural outcome of the total process. What needs to be explained is the failure of many who embark upon this voyage to return from it. Do these encounter circumstances either in family life or in institutional care so grossly maladaptive that even the richest and best organized hallucinatory experience cannot save them?” Perceval’s Narrative P.xiii-xiv

RD Laing on disturbed people – “the immediate interpersonal environment of “schizophrenics” has come to be studied in its interstices. This work was prompted, in the first place, by psychotherapists who formed the impression that, if their patients were disturbed, their families were often (113) very disturbing.” P.112 – 113, The Politics of Experience

“There is no such “condition” as “schizophrenia,” but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event. This political event, occurring in the civic order of society, imposes definitions and consequences on the labeled person. It is a social prescription that rationalizes a set of actions whereby the labeled person is annexed by others, who are legally sanctioned, medically empowered and morally obliged, to become responsible for the person labeled. The person labeled is inaugurated not only into a role, but (122) into a career of patient, by the concerted action of a coalition (a “conspiracy”) of family, G. P., mental health officer, psychiatrists, nurses, psychiatric social workers, and often fellow patients. The “committed” person labeled as patient, and specifically as “schizophrenic,” is degraded from full existential and legal status as human agent and responsible person to someone no longer in possession of his own definition of himself, unable to retain his own possessions, precluded from the exercise of his discretion as to whom he meets, what he does. His time is no longer his own and the space he occupies is no longer of his choosing. After being subjected to a degradation ceremonial known as psychiatric examination, he is bereft of his civil liberties in being imprisoned in a total institution known as a “mental” hospital. More completely, more radically than anywhere else in our society, he is invalidated as a human being. In the mental hospital he must remain, until the label is rescinded or qualified by such terms as “remitted” or “readjusted.” Once a “schizophrenic,” there is a tendency to be regarded as always a “schizophrenic.”” P.121-122, The Politics of Experience