ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues a line of critical questioning concerning how we come to ‘know’ the embodied, discursive and biopolitical dimensions of mental health and illness in the context of physical cultures. In terms of a physical cultural studies (PCS) sensibility I situate my engagement with both epistemic and everyday issues of injustice within a feminist context that understands the personal as political. Over the past decade I have explored questions about the cultural formation of ‘normal and abnormal’ subjectivities in everyday contexts with respect to shifting public discourses about increasing mental health problems. This intellectual inquiry has also been shaped by my family biography that was severely disrupted by the iatrogenic effects of psychiatry in 1950s Australia (Ehrenberg, 2009). My grandmother and uncle (her son) were both diagnosed as ‘paranoid schizophrenics’ and endured therapeutic treatment that was informed by emerging theories of brain dysfunction, failure of maternal bonding and genealogical impurities. Mental illness was a shameful infliction that brought institutional confinement, over-medication, electric shock treatment and the violation of basic rights. By the 1980s Australian mental health policies embraced the shift to deinstitutionalization as the medical model was increasingly challenged by advocacy and human rights movements that were gathering momentum in the US, Canada and the UK. Thirty years after his ‘breakdown’ during the pressure of final school exams (he was dux at the time), my uncle moved into a house, learned to cook, manage his own money and began to enjoy the freedom of everyday movement.
