People who are diagnosed with severe mental illness experience some of the most extreme and pervasive prejudice of all groups in Western society. How can this still be so? Although the term mental illness is typically reserved for the most serious of cases, psychiatrys medical model is expanding into increasingly everyday realms. Thus, in concert with efforts to reduce social stigma, mental illness is becoming normal. Nevertheless, abnormality is a requirement of biopsychiatry and its offshoots; professionals require some thing to remedy. How do clinical professionals manage these tensions? And what alternatives are there to the pathologizing of such phenomena?
Such concerns are considered in relation to my main thesis question: How do professionals represent schizophrenia and hearing voices in theoretical texts, and how is that played out in the minutiae of therapy practices? Drawing on discourse analysis and conversation analysis, I critique professional categorizations of what are typically known as schizophrenia, mental illness, patients, clients, and therapists. My case in point is the experience of hearing voices - pathologically known as auditory hallucinations. Delusional beliefs are also considered.
In Part 1, accounts of voices as supernatural or ordinary phenomena, or as a symptom of severe mental illness, are considered. Mainstream psychiatric and psychological texts are analyzed and critical alternatives are summarized.
In Part 2, a selection of studies of interactions involving severe mental illness are reviewed and ongoing analytic/methodological debates are discussed. A cognitivebehavioural therapy group for hearing distressing voices then provides data from clinical talk-in-interaction for analysis. I focus on negotiations of reality (the ordinary versus the psychiatric) and on what I take to be sanist prejudice-in-action.
Part 3 relates findings from Part 2 to the context and findings of Part 1. There is also discussion of the positive implications of a more social and dialogical approach to understanding and otherwise dealing with the phenomena in question; for voice hearers, schizophrenics, and society at large.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/221623 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | mwise@westnet.com.au, Michael Wise |
| Publisher | Murdoch University |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.murdoch.edu.au/goto/CopyrightNotice, Copyright Michael Wise |
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