Mental Health as Ruination: The Psychiatrization of Space and Poverty in Seattle

Abstract

AbstractThis essay draws on ethnographic research I conducted in “clubhouse” spaces in two community mental health clinics serving economically disadvantaged people of color and immigrants in Seattle. Drawing on my informants’ experiences in the Pioneer Square neighborhood—an enclave associated with the “homeless mentally ill”—and in mental health clinics, I track the displacement and containment of a “right to the city” for impoverished people. I track the notion of the homeless mentally ill as a figure of postwar psychiatric discourse through its history in Seattle, arguing that postwar American psychiatry and community mental health recoded poverty as a question of madness, transforming the material needs and the rights of citizenship of the poor into questions of “character reform” and therapeutic services. I suggest that the imagination of Pioneer Square and the deprivation my informants experienced in mental health clinics is not a side effect of clinical “mismanagement” but rather part of an ongoing practice of what Ann Stoler calls “ruination,” ritualized indignities embedded in the paternalistic separation of the material and the therapeutic in postwar American psychiatry. Ultimately I address questions of poverty, home, and rights to space in Seattle.