Dwelling with Multiplicity: Negotiating Borders in the Lifeworld of First Episode Psychosis

Abstract

This paper explores intersections of cure, harm, diagnostic practices, and lifeworlds of mental disability within the field of first episode psychosis. Drawing on findings from a collaborative art workshop developed within an ethnographic study of first episode psychosis, we contrast the experience and phenomenology of psychosis within the art workshops with the construction of psychosis in traditional clinical spaces. Engaging concepts of dwelling, borderlands, and lifeworld within this context, we detail how the workshops countered the ways in which institutional and methodological structuring of narratives of psychosis reinforce diagnostic boundaries. In contrast to the clinical setting, a fuller lifeworld was experienced through witnessing the aesthetics of artwork that was created within the project.