Patienternas psykiatri : En studie av institutionella erfarenheter

Sammanfattning: The study deals with the experiences of patients in psychiatric care as documented in retrospective interviews, and in letters, novels, report books and magazine articles from the 50s to the 90s in Sweden. The patients' perspective on the encounter with psychiatry is systematically put into focus by thematising a large number of patient's accounts.Public committee and authority reports as well as professional journals are used as secondary materials.An overarching theme is how the relationship between psychiatryand its patients evolves within the institutions as material and social environments. Social interaction within this institutional context formsthe experiences and results in patienthood as a distinctive mode ofcoping with the situation. A number of phases can be distinguished inthe process from novice to experienced patient. The process leading to patienthood begins with the first admission to the psychiatric institution.The distinctive characteristic of most patients' experiences of this event is a sense of alienation. The institutional need for discipline is expressed through spatial and temporal structures and these reinforce patienthood - continuously confirmed in the interaction between patientand staff.All the patients' accounts of their encounters with institutional psychiatry,a kind of collective biography, point to conditions which have existed for a long time. In spite of major changes within psychiatric care in the last decades as documented in public reports, the patients' experiences of the encounter with psychiatry remain the same in most respects. The socio-material structures seem to be tenacious.