Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives

This book challenges the perception of the psychiatric chart as a neutral and objective text. The chapters included in this book coalesce to reveal the psychiatric chart as a text that is, in fact, “storied” by institutional ideology that reflects, reinforces, reinterprets, and, at times, resists gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed norms, values, and presuppositions. Intersectional analysis highlights the nuanced ways in which dominant ideologies are activated in chart documentation to produce qualitatively specific psychiatric narratives of distress and related responses in the psychiatric institution. The book serves as a much-needed resource for mental health professionals, education and training programs, and researchers that meaningfully takes into account the social and structural materiality of people’s lives and its impact on experiences of distress. It will also appeal to scholars investigating equity in health care across the fields of Critical Psychology, Disability Studies, Social Work, Allied Health, Mad Studies and Social Justice.

About the Author

Andrea Daley is Professor at the School of Social Work, Renison University College, at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She practices critical research methods to engage politics of knowledge building with communities towards the goal of social transformation.

Merrick D. Pilling is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Windsor, Canada. His work employs an intersectional, anti-racist lens that emphasizes the importance of lived experience, relevance to the communities being researched, and making changes to the systems that create marginalization.