Abstract
Psychiatric practice involves writing as much as it involves talking. This study examines the interpretive processes of reading, writing and interviewing which are central to the clinical interaction. It is part of a broader ethnographic study of an Australian psychiatric hospital (which specializes in the treatment of patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia). The paper examines two major types of written assessment of patients — the admission assessment and the ‘complete work-up.’ Writing is analyzed as performance, thereby focusing on the transformations that are effected in patients, their perceptions of their schizophrenia, and their total identity. One crucial transformation is from ‘person suffering from schizophrenia’ to ‘schizophrenic.’ The paper aims to show that as much as psychiatry is a ‘talking cure’ it is also a ‘writing cure.’
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Austin, J. L. 1962 How to Do Things with Words. London: Oxford University Press.
Bosk, Charles 1979 Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burke, Kenneth 1969 A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1982 Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature. In Deborah Tannen, ed., pp. 35–54. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
Chapman, J. 1966 The Early Symptoms of Schizophrenia. British Journal of Psychiatry 112: 225–251.
Cicourel, Aaron V. 1968 The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Cicourel, Aaron V. 1974 Interviewing and Memory. In Pragmatic Aspects of Human Communication. C. Cherry, ed., pp. 51–82. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Daniels, Arlene Kaplan 1975 Professionalism in Formal Organizations. In Processing People: Cases in Organizational Behaviour. John B. McKinley, ed., pp. 303–338. London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow 1982 Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Erikson, Kai T. and Daniel E. Gilbertson 1969 Case Records in the Mental Hospital. In Stanton Wheeler, ed., pp. 389–412.
Foucault, Michel 1973 The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. London: Tavistock.
Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Frank, Gelya 1979 Finding the Common Denominator: A Phenomenological Critique of the Life History Method. Ethos 7: 68–94.
Frankel, Richard M. 1984 From Sentence to Sequence: Understanding the Medical Encounter through Microinteractional Analysis. Discourse Processes 7: 135–170.
Freidson, Eliot 1970 Profession of Medicine: A Study in the Sociology of Applied Knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Garfinkel, Harold 1956 Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology 61: 420–424.
Garfinkel, Harold 1974 ‘Good’ Organizational Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinic Records. In Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings. Roy Turner, ed., pp. 109–127. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Gilbert, Nigel and Michael Mulkay 1980 Contexts of Scientific Discourse: Social Accounting in Experimental Papers. In The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, Sociology of the Sciences, Vol. IV. Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn and Richard Whitley, eds., pp. 269–294. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Goffman, Erving 1968 Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Goody, Jack 1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Handelman, Don 1978 Bureaucratic Interpretation: The Perception of Child Abuse in Urban Newfoundland. In Bureaucracy and World View: Studies in the Logic of Official Interpretation. Social and Economic Studies, No. 22. Institute of Social and Economic Research. Memorial University of Newfoundland. Pp. 15–68. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Heath, Christian 1982 Preserving the Consultation: Medical Record Cards and Professional Conduct. Sociology of Health and Illness 4(1): 56–74.
Heath, Shirley Brice 1982 Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions. In Deborah Tannen, ed., pp. 91–118. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
Hymes, Dell 1972 Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., pp. 35–71. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Kleinman, Arthur 1982 Neurasthenia and Depression: A Study of Somatization and Culture in China. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 6: 117–190.
Labov, William and David Fanshel 1977 Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Leder, Drew 1984 Medicine and the Paradigms of Embodiment, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9: 29–43.
MacCarthy, Mary 1951 The Groves of Academe. New York: Avon Books.
MacKinnon, Roger A. 1980 Diagnosis and Psychiatry: Examination of the Psychiatric Patient: Psychiatric Interview. In Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, III(1). Harold I. Kaplan, Alfred M. Freedman and Benjamin J. Sadock, eds., pp. 895–905. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
Millman, Marcia 1977 The Unkindest Cut: Life in the Backrooms of Medicine. New York: William Morrow.
Mishler, Eliot G. 1979 Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind? Harvard Educational Review 49(1): 1–19.
Mishler, Eliot G. 1984 The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
Movahedi, Siamak 1975 Loading the Dice in Favour of Madness. Journal of Health and Social Behaviour 16(2): 192–197.
Pittenger, Robert E., Charles F. Hockett and John J. Danehy 1960 The First Five Minutes: A Sample of Microscopic Interview Analysis. New York: Paul Martineau.
Raffel, Stanley 1979 Matters of Fact: A Sociological Inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Ricoeur, Paul 1979 The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text. In Interpretive Social Science: A. Reader. P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan, eds., pp. 73–101. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ricoeur, Paul 1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenhan, David L. 1973 On Being Sane in Insane Places. Science 179: 250–258.
Rosenhan, Paul 1981 The Contextual Nature of Psychiatric Diagnosis. In The Sociology of Mental Illness: Basic Studies. Oscar Grusky and Melvin Pollner, eds., pp. 319–329. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Schneider, Kurt 1974 Primary and Secondary Symptoms in Schizophrenia. In Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry. Steven R. Hirsch, Michael Shepherd and Lothar Kalinowsky, eds., pp. 40–44. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Schutz, Alfred 1962 Scheler's Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego. In Collected Papers, I: The Problem of Social Reality. Maurice Natanson, ed., pp. 150–179. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred 1967 The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckman 1973 The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Scott, Marvin B. And Stanford M. Lyman 1968 Accounts. American Sociological Review 33(1): 47–62.
Sharrock, W.W. and Roy Turner 1978 On a Conversational Environment for Equivocality. In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction. Jim Schenkein, ed., pp. 173–197. New York: Academic Press.
Silverman, David 1975 Accounts of Organizations — Organizational ‘Structures’ and the Accounting Process. In Processing People: Cases in Organizational Behaviour. John B. McKinley, ed., pp. 269–302. London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Smith, Dorothy E. 1974 The Social Construction of Documentary Reality. Sociological Inquiry 44(4): 257–268.
Strauss, Anselm and Rue Bucher 1975 Professions in Process. In Professions, Work and Careers. Anselm Strauss, ed., pp. 9–23. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books.
Strauss, J. S. 1969 Hallucinations and Delusions as Points on Continua Function, Archives of General Psychiatry 21: 581–586.
Sullivan, Harry Stack 1954 The Psychiatric Interview. New York: W.W. Norton.
Tannen, Deborah 1982 Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.
Turner, Bryan 1984 The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Vaughn, Christine E. and Julian P. Leff 1981 Patterns of Emotional Response in Relatives of Schizophrenic Patients. Schizophrenia Bulletin 7(1): 43–44.
Weber, Max 1970 Bureaucracy. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., pp. 196–244. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wheeler, Stanton 1969 On Record: Files and Dossiers in American Life. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.
Woolgar, Steve 1980 Discovery, Logic and Sequence in a Scientific Text. In The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, Sociology of the Sciences, Vol. IV. Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn and Richard Whitley, eds., pp. 239–268. Dordrecht: Reidel.
World Health Organization 1978 International Classification of Diseases: Manual of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Zimmerman, Don H. 1979 Record-Keeping and the Intake Process in a Public Welfare Agency. In Stanton Wheeler, ed., pp. 319–354.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Barrett, R.J. Clinical writing and the documentary construction of schizophrenia. Cult Med Psych 12, 265–299 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00051971
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00051971