Beyond the “Crazy House”: Mental/Moral Breakdowns and Moral Agency in First‐Episode Psychosis

Abstract

This paper draws on a two‐year, longitudinal, prospective study of 38 young people diagnosed with early psychosis. It focuses on one young Mexican‐American woman, Ariana, over a five month period during and after her initial hospitalization for a psychotic break. I trace Ariana's moral experiences as she goes through a process of “moral breakdown” and moral rejuvenation (Zigon 2007). Ariana uses moral experiments and “ordinary ethics” to re‐imagine herself as a good person living a good life beyond the limitations of her diagnosis, prescriptions for her treatment, and the reaction of her broader community to her experience (Lambek 2010; Robbins 2013; Mattingly 2014). Her work exposes the importance and potential of intersubjective moral experimentation for healing. This paper also looks closely at the moral entanglements of the ethnographer and interlocutor to re‐imagine the ways ethnographic work can help us all mutually repair moral wounds.

Struggling Along in Nigeria: Depression, Treatment, and Morality

“…The experience is more profound when personal mental health struggles expectedly—or unexpectedly—surface, and the ethnographer transforms “from a detached researcher to a vulnerable fellow human” (Wu 2020, 110). Such resurfacing struggles abruptly shift an imagined status of the outside to a shared space of experience—or “interexperience” (Myers 2019; Parish 2014; Porter 2016). We contend that the acknowledgment of interexperience, including those with colleagues, is another way to challenge the persistent anthropological practice to counter Western models of the individual self by (over)emphasizing the social personhood of our interlocutors.…”

“…Joseph, for instance, once stated that mental health problems were viewed “as some sort of, you know, death sentence. Once you have it, … there's not much you can do as a person anymore.” Failing to live up to these societal standards and exhibiting “abnormal” behavior gave rise to a sense of “mutual incomprehensibility” (Myers 2019, 15). Working, marrying, and bearing children were all considered to be out of reach of “mad” people, while these activities and events were precisely among the things that matter most for many young Nigerians in pursuit of a good life.…”

“…Beth said she had not shared her story with anyone else, and her revelations overwhelmed me with a sense of responsibility. Anthropologist Myers (2019) aptly captures how the relationship between an interlocutor and an ethnographer creates an opportunity for moral reorientation in an intersubjective space. In response, I reached out to fellow anthropologists to share my doubts and insecurities.…”

“…In the next section, we engage more thoroughly with the recent moral approach to mental health in anthropology—largely inspired by Martin Heidegger—that demonstrates that psychic troubles may appear as mental or moral breakdowns of familiar experience (or dasein ) that require ethical performance (Myers 2019; Zigon 2007). In the subsequent section, we explain that psychic life and morality are entangled differently among young Nigerian adults coping with depression.…”

“…55Not harming oneself or others is an ethical code widely shared in our psychic worlds (Myers 2019, 23). Grounded in the Christian and the Islamic faiths, suicide is widely rejected and even punishable by law in Nigeria (Adinkrah 2016; Gearing and Alonzo 2018).…”