Självskada och berättelser om psykiatrin

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the construction of psychiatry and patienthood in personal accounts of self-harm. Drawing on interviews and dialogues from Internet message boards, I show that the relationship between psychiatry and the self-harming patient is often critically framed. Psychiatry is said to pay too much attention to acts of self-harm instead of trying to understand the patient's thoughts and feelings. This particular construction of psychiatry enables different identities for the patients. On the one hand, they are defined in terms of their problematic behaviours and thus positioned as entirely pathological. On the other hand, this also opens up for agency and acts of resistance against the asymmetrical power relations in psychiatric care.