Normativity, Marginality, and Deviance in a Psychiatric Placement: A Parallel Process

Abstract

This article explores links between normativity, marginality, and deviance via the experiences of the author, a trainee psychotherapist on a psychiatric placement in an American mental health emergency services unit. Drawing on her own experience as a woman of Sri Lankan heritage living in postcolonial Great Britain, she weaves together themes of identity, power, and marginalization, asking questions about the lived experience of those who are positioned as deviant by normative society. She uses the work of social and political theorists to illustrate how such themes are integrated at a wider group level. Two distinct forms of writing are used as a self-reflexive mechanism offering both personal revelation and critical analysis: the autoethnographical and the theoretical as a method of intersubjective textual speculation on that which lies in and outside of awareness. The author holds the view that there are gains to be made when we place psychotherapeutic concerns back into the world in which we live.