Open walls: the experience of psychiatric institutionalization through egyptian women's drawings

Identifier:  TDX:2233

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2233

Authors:  Cover, Ilaria

Abstract:
The analysis of how Egyptian women experience psychiatric hospitalization calls into question the nature of the “total institution” and sheds light on the strong connections between social suffering and mental distress. Classical ethnographic research methods were combined with art expression techniques. The methodology was based on drawing sessions at the Alexandria psychiatric hospital library in which inpatients, members of the medical staff and the anthropologist all participated. Besides being a fundamental source of data, this activity was intended to create horizontal relational dynamics between all the participants. The anthropologist’s reflexivity on the emotions and reflections triggered by these encounters served to deepen the understanding of Egyptian women’s life experience both inside and outside the psychiatric hospital. The analysis demonstrates that the psychiatric hospital, far from being isolated and disconnected from the social world outside the institution’s walls, is profoundly shaped by it. On the one hand, the low quality of the services offered at the hospital is the materialization of a structural violence that typically targets disadvantaged strata of the population. On the other hand, the anamnesis, diagnosis and prognosis of women who become psychiatric patients are all influenced by the vulnerability they experience because of their gender and socio-economic status. This explains why the asylum, a place in which people’s freedom and rights are suppressed, can also be experienced by inpatients as a protective, reassuring place. The analysis explores the ways in which female inpatients both embody and resist institutional logic, turning to their advantage situations that are potentially detrimental to them. The psychiatric hospital is conceived not as a space of alterity and exceptionality, but as one that is representative of everyday, ordinary injustices that women experience in their homes and in their city streets.