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Agency, materiality and mental illness

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Abstract

Psychiatric discourses and practices have been at the forefront of using and disseminating a voluntary, autonomous and human-focused concept of agency. The following article presents an everyday psychiatric situation as a way of illustrating how non-human agents such as things and material objects influence not only what people do, but also who they are. It will be discussed how agency might be brought out of the interior of the mind into the space of material and social interactions, thereby guiding an individual's behavior through a kind of distributed effect. Thus, agency must be understood in a relational way, as a product of interaction, assigning materiality a more substantial role in changing a person's behavior.

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Notes

  1. The following episode took place in a general in-patient psychiatric facility at the Hospital Berlin Neukölln, where I was working as a clinical psychiatrist. The institution takes a rather social-psychiatrist approach and treats approximately 30 patients of various social backgrounds. In the following, I use the pronoun ‘we’ to describe the actions taken by the staff as a team.

  2. The following uses different terms to describe what the mentioned objects and materials did to the case study's patient: at times they ‘modulated’ her actions, then they shaped her intentions, ‘prescribed’ a particular way of her being or ‘generated’ and ‘organized’ specific practices. These different ways of phrasing the effects of non-human agents are meant to account for the fact that materials and things can influence human beings to various degrees and in numerous ways (Latour, 1998). Further, as stated by Mol et al (2010), our language is ill suited to speaking about care practices, such as we have to ‘juggle with […] and adapt it’ (p. 10).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the patient for allowing me to analyze the situations described here. She considered herself a model whose participation could help anthropologists and scholars of psychiatric discourses and practices learn about how people can experience and become agents of change.

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von Peter, S. Agency, materiality and mental illness. Soc Theory Health 11, 317–326 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.3

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