The experience of being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder: living the label
- Authors: Knight, Zelda G , Bradfield, Bruce
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6262 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007880
- Description: Informed by the investigative thrust of phenomenological inquiry and the 'phenomenology of intersubjectivity', the overarching aim of this article is to provide an accurate illumination of the experience of being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and thus being 'a labelled individual'. This article is based on research that sought to understand the impact of the psychiatric label upon labelled individuals interpersonal and intersubjective presence as experienced outside the psychiatric institution. The principle question asked was: "What is the experience of being a labelled individual in the world?". It was discovered that psychiatric labelling unfolds as a disconnection and dislocation from co-existence with others. Moreover, labelling had the effect of robbing such individuals of their subjectivity, rendering them lonely, misunderstood and viewed as somehow defective, disabled and wrong.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2003
Mental illness and the consciousness of freedom: the phenomenology of psychiatric labelling
- Authors: Bradfield, Bruce
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6264 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007882
- Description: Paradigmatically led by existential phenomenological premises, as formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl specifically, this paper aims at a deconstruction of the value of psychiatric labelling in terms of the implications of such labelling for the labelled individual's experience of freedom as a conscious imperative. This work has as its intention the destabilisation of labelling as a stubborn and inexorable mechanism for social propriety and regularity, which in its unyielding classificatory brandings is.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2002