Dwelling with Multiplicity: Negotiating Borders in the Lifeworld of First Episode Psychosis

In first-episode psychosis care, clinical settings often reinforce diagnostic boundaries and narrow the understanding of patients' experiences. A collaborative art workshop, part of an ethnographic study, offered a contrasting space where the aesthetics of artwork allowed a fuller lifeworld to emerge. By engaging concepts of dwelling, borderlands, and lifeworld, the workshops countered the institutional and methodological structuring of psychosis narratives, revealing how cure, harm, and diagnostic practices intersect with mental disability. The experience and phenomenology of psychosis in the art workshops differed markedly from its construction in traditional clinical spaces, suggesting that creative practices can open up richer, less constrained accounts of mental distress.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper explores intersections of cure, harm, diagnostic practices, and lifeworlds of mental disability within the field of first episode psychosis. Drawing on findings from a collaborative art workshop developed within an ethnographic study of first episode psychosis, we contrast the experience and phenomenology of psychosis within the art workshops with the construction of psychosis in traditional clinical spaces. Engaging concepts of dwelling, borderlands, and lifeworld within this context, we detail how the workshops countered the ways in which institutional and methodological structuring of narratives of psychosis reinforce diagnostic boundaries. In contrast to the clinical setting, a fuller lifeworld was experienced through witnessing the aesthetics of artwork that was created within the project.