Abstract
Documents are some of the most durable elements of institutional practices, flowing across time and space, through walls, and across systems. Psychiatric charts are texts that can produce differences between people, especially along the lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability status. This chapter asks, “What shapes the ways in which differences between patients are written about, and what happens as a result?” Building on the approach of institutional ethnography, I investigate how electronic psychiatric forms themselves require writers to scrutinize and sort people in particular ways. I consider examples from interviews with mental health professionals alongside excerpts from psychiatric charts to examine how “who” a patient is seen to be can enter into what is written about them. I consider the attribution of rationality and professional authority through language of what is “appropriate” and through the designation of certain patients’ accounts and desires as reasonable, and others as unreliable or suspicious.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Daley, A., Costa, L. & Ross, L. E. (2012). (W)righting women: Constructions of gender, sexuality, and race in the psychiatric chart. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 14(8), 955–969. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2012.712718
Dyck, E., & Deighton, A. (2017). Managing madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the transformation of psychiatric care in Canada. University of Manitoba Press.
Flanagan, M., Miller, R., & Davidson, L. (2009). “Unfortunately, we treat the chart”: Sources of stigma in mental health settings. Psychiatric Quarterly, 80(1), 55–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-009-9093-7
Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Penguin Random House. (Original work published in 1961)
Gibson, M. F. (2016). “This is real now because it’s a piece of paper”: Texts, disability and LGBTQ parents. Disability & Society, 31(5), 641–658. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1197822
Goutor, D. (2007). Constructing the “great menace”: Canadian labour’s opposition to Asian immigration, 1880–1914. Canadian Historical Review, 88(4), 549–576. https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.88.4.549
Joseph, A. J. (2019). Contemporary forms of legislative imprisonment and colonial violence in forensic mental health. In A. Daley, L. Costa, & P. Beresford (Eds.), Madness, violence, and power: A critical collection (pp. 169–183). University of Toronto Press.
Lewis, R., Adler, D. A., Dixon, L. B., Goldman, B., Hackman, A. L., Oslin, D. W., Siris, S. G., & Valenstein, M. (2011). The psychiatric note in the era of electronic communication. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 199(4), 212–213. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0b013e318216376f
McCoy, L. (1995). Activating the photographic text. In M. L. Campbell & A. Manicom (Eds.), Knowledge, experience and ruling relations: Studies in the social organization of knowledge (pp. 181–192). University of Toronto Press.
McCoy, L. (2006). Keeping the institution in view: Working with interview accounts of everyday experience. In D. Smith (Ed.), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 109–125). Rowman & Littlefield.
Pilling, M. D., Daley, A., Gibson, M. F., Ross, L. E., & Zaheer, J. (2018). Assessing insight: Determining agency and autonomy. In J. M. Kilty & E. Dej (Eds.), Containing madness: Gender and “psy” in institutional contexts (pp. 191–214). Palgrave Macmillan.
Saw, C. (2017). Transgender patient care on the inpatient psychiatric unit. American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal, 12(11), 7–8. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2017.121103
Smith, D. E. (1978). “K is mentally ill”: The anatomy of a factual account. Sociology, 12(1), 23–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857801200103
Smith, D. E. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. University of Toronto Press.
Smith, D. E. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. University of Toronto Press.
Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. University of Toronto Press.
Wright, D., Jacklin, L., & Themeles, T. (2013). Dying to get out of the asylum: Mortality and madness in four mental hospitals in Victorian Canada, c. 1841–1891. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 87(4), 591–621. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2013.0079
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being. New Centennial Review, 3, 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gibson, M.F. (2021). Forming the Chart: Texts, Actions, and Differences. In: Daley, A., Pilling, M.D. (eds) Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83692-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83692-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83691-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83692-4
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)