The Foucauldian Madwoman: Four Weeks in a Psychiatric Facility
Abstract
This article is simultaneously a personal narrative and a Foucauldian analysis of the author's embodied reality as a racialized woman hospitalized in a Western psychiatric facility. The author is the narrator, the mental patient (main character of the story) and the person who deconstructs the experience (researcher, insider). This unique position – a South-Asian patient and a researcher/scholar trained in a Western academic institute – provides her an opportunity to give voice to her direct experiences in the psychiatric facility, as well as describe her reality of mental illness. Such rare, self-reflective ‘insider’ perspectives challenge the Euro-centric conceptualizations of ‘mental health’ and may be unsettling to the psychiatry/psychotherapy and/or academic communities. As our population becomes more diverse, mental health professionals and policy makers will need this knowledge to broaden their understanding of how members of diverse cultures may experience mental health, as well as to support them in their cultural ways of self-healing. Social science research methodologies that do not further reinforce the binary – us/them, expert/client – offer a holistic understanding of clients' mental health and are necessary to develop effective psychotherapeutic interventions.
Key words: mental health, psychiatry, immigrant women, culture, ethnography, Foucault.
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