It is now well documented that mass incarceration has resulted in increasing numbers of individuals with mental health diagnoses being housed in carceral and forensic or psychiatric institutions across the globe. Often, those identified as mentally ill are subject to exceptional forms of detention, including the frequent use of segregation or solitary confinement and physical or mechanical restraint measures (e.g., the WRAP and the Pinel Board1) as well as mandated forms of âtreatmentâ typically by way of prescription psychotropic medications (and forced chemical injections when the patient or prisoner refuses said prescribed medications ) and mandatory cognitive-behavioural programming (Arrigo and Bullock 2008; Etter et al. 2008; OCI 2013; Vogel et al. 2014). Relatedly, there are increasing numbers of individuals receiving mental health services in the community and living on the streets or in precarious forms of housing (Davis 2013). This particular phenomenon is due in part to the deinstitutionalization movement that occurred between the 1960s and 1990s, whereby in-patient psychiatric bed space was reduced in order to provide more mental health support in the community rather than in spaces of physical confinement (Rogers and Pilgrim 2010; Sealy and Whitehead 2004; Wilson 1996). Unfortunately, those individuals who are unable to find adequate care in the community are often taken up by the criminal justice system, an unintended consequence that is commonly referred to as âtranscarcerationâ (Kilty and DeVellis 2010; Lowman et al. 1987; Stroman 2003) and that the late Stan Cohen (1985) described as a result of the incessant widening of the carceral net in the era of mass incarceration .
Within historic spaces of confinement as well as in more contemporary institutional and transcarceral sites, the medical model remains the dominant explanatory approach for interpreting and understanding human behaviour and the preeminent analytic tool and modality for âtreatment interventionâ. Given the medical modelâs propensity towards individualized and essentialist understandings of emotional and psychological distress (Rimke and Brock 2012; Tew 2005), it is important to make sense of the ways in which the different forms of social control that are born from the medical gaze are gendered and the material experiences of those who are caught up in and by its oppressive institutions, discourses, and practices. The chapters in this edited volume take up this call by examining the psy discourses (by which we mean the language and diagnostic structures inherent to psychiatry , psychology , and other biomedical explanatory modalities), associated practices, and experiential accounts of varied forms of institutional confinement (e.g., the prison and other forms of detention and holding, the forensic or mental hospital, the homeless shelter, and even by way of community-based interventions) as they are mediated by gender and other markers of structural oppressionânamely race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, class , and sexuality.
Broadly speaking, this book investigates the intersection of âpsyâ interventions, practices, discourses, gender, and institutionalization. Specifically, the collection explores the discursive production and treatment of mental illness, which, following Jane Ussher (2010, 2011), we conceptualize as distress as it is mediated by gender in different institutional and transcarceral contexts. A critically oriented and feminist -inspired collection of analyses, contributors speak to different issues germane to the multiple interlocking oppressions that result in the diagnosis and medical, psychological, and/or psychiatric treatment of individuals constituted or constructed as âmentally illâ. Contributors draw from a variety of critical bodies of literatureânotably, critical and feminist criminology, critical psy and mad scholarship, critical disability studies, critical race studies, critical nursing studies, feminist post-structuralism, and gender studies (i.e., gender performativity and the âdoing genderâ literatures).
The scope of this book is intentionally broad in order to provide innovative insight into the diverse ways that psy discourses and practices are mediated by gender and institutional and transcarceral settings. Together, the discussions offered herein accomplish two large goals. First, the chapters in this book work to reformulate the traditional notion of institutionalization so as to move beyond strict conceptualizations of what are typically described as spaces of confinement or containment. As âtotal institutionsâ (Goffman 1961) the prison and the mental hospital (i.e., the asylum and contemporary forensic and psychiatric hospital facilities) are long-standing disciplinary sites (Foucault 1976, 1979, 1988) that warrant continued investigation of the gendered, raced, and heteronormative ways in which men and women experience psy-care. In addition to this effort, in this book we take up Cohenâs (1985) call to examine the long shadow of incarceration by casting a wider net vis-Ă -vis institutional containment in order to consider other discursive and physical sites of social control that are related to, but distinct from, the prison and the asylum . Chapters in this collection also consider how the language and technologies of psychiatric diagnosis and practice and spaces such as the homeless shelter and actors in the wider community take up psyâs grammar in uniquely gendered ways and thus provide new avenues for considering how psy-discourses and practices act as dynamic forms of governance in a multiplicity of institutional and transcarceral settings.
Second, this book approaches the notion of gender fluidly. Often, books focus exclusively on a single gender. Historically, much of the literature on carceral settings addressed only male prisoners (Adelberg and Currie 1987), while much of the critical psy and âmadnessâ scholarship studies the material experiences and disproportionate number of mental illness diagnoses amongst women (for an excellent example see Chan et al. 2009 edited book, Women, Madness and the Law: A Feminist Reader). At times, however, this research inadvertently reinforces gendered notions of madness and badness. Moreover, there is little scholarship that assesses how individuals who exist outside of the gender binary experience distinct forms of oppression. This collection aims to critically engage with the broader parameters of gender by considering norms of masculinity and femininity , the institutional experiences of transgender/gender non-conforming men and women, and the effects of heteronormativity in order to examine the ways in which they mediate psy discourses, diagnoses and intervention strategies, and disciplinary technologies.
While the book is international in scope it contains a great deal of uniquely Canadian content that will be of great value to Canadian audiences. We have enlisted the contributions of several internationally renowned authors to explore the similarities and differences in how psy, gender, and institutionalization manifest in various political, economic, social, and geographic contexts. There are a number of similarly critical edited book collections on the market, for example Mad Matters (edited by LeFrançois et al. 2013) or Disability Incarcerated (edited by Ben-Moshe et al. 2014), that consider how evolving political rationalities shape the confinement and incarceration of marginalized peoples and that share our interest in critically exploring forms of containment beyond the prison and hospital. These texts are tremendously valuable in that they set the stage for a number of the discussions raised in this book (notably, those centred on the interlocking systems of social and psy control and confinement), yet they do not specifically examine the impacts and effects of the intersection of gender (diverse performatives thereof) and psy, although these themes do emerge in some of their chapters. By contrast, the content of this edited collection centres analytic consideration at the intersection of gender, psy, and varying forms of institutional containment. In what follows we provide an overview of the bookâs contents.
Chapter Organization
In order to organize the varying discussions presented throughout this collection, we divided this book into three overarching parts: (I) Historical âPsyâ Discourses Revisited; (II) Containing Bodies; and (III) The Asylum and Beyond. The chapters contained in Part I are exceptionally useful in setting up the broader approach and critical narrative taken up throughout the contents of the rest of the book. In effect, these three chapters help to set the stage for considering the historicity of psyâs power to identify and define madness , to locate its roots and causes, and to determine the common methods of intervention and treatment , as well as the dominant technologies of discipline that are used to subordinate and control risky, a...