The Absurdalities of Mental Illness – A Narrative Inquiry into Psychiatric Diagnosis

Henrik Loodin

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.5.1.05

Authors

Henrik Loodin Lund University, Sweden

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.5.1.05

Keywords:

Narrative, Estrangement, Psychiatry, Life Stories

Abstract

This text examines three life stories about becoming mentally ill and Albert Camus’ fictive narrative “The Stranger”. The main concern is how the social and psychiatry intervenes in the narrative that the interviewees give. Drawing from a reasoning in Michel Foucaults monograph Madness and Civilization and Dorothy Smiths work on relations of ruling the argument in this article is that when becoming mentally ill one is involved in a process of loosing agency in ones own life story. Illustratively with Camus novel the analysis unravel that the interviewees become strangers in their own life story.

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Author Biography

Henrik Loodin, Lund University, Sweden

Henrik Loodin is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden. His main research areas of interest include medical sociology and its subdiscipline sociology of mental disorders. He is also interested in narrative methods, autobiographical research and migration. In his current research, he seeks to understand the social processes and exclusionary mechanisms involved when receiving the psychiatric diagnosis posttraumatic stress disorder. Henrik is a member of the Swedish Sociological Association executive board and connected to the Vårdal Institute.

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