Urban everyday life of people with experience of psychosis - a collaborativ-ethnographic inquiry through social anthropology and psychiatry

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Jörg Niewöhner; Professor Dr. Sebastian von Peter
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427092996

This project investigates the everyday lives of people with experience of pychosis in rapidly changing urban spaces. Based on a qualitative-quantitative mixed methods approach with an emphasis on ethnographic approaches, we will inquire into everyday experiences, socio-spatial changes and new social psychiatric forms of knowledge and therapy in relation to each other. The project conducts research about and with people with experiences of psychosis, with varying degrees of involvement with the psychiatric care infrastructure. The project will, firstly, analyse how the relation between urban space and psychotic experience is produced by those affected. Secondly, it will contribute to answering the question how these relations feed back into everyday practices of people affected by psychosis. Thirdly, the project will discuss to what extent these relations can be usefully generalised beyond those mentally affected to a more general population of marginalised people and how they are affected by urban techniques of governance. The empirical work will focus on the Berlin district of Neukölln. The following methods will be used: analysis of social space, questionnaire survey and interviews to identify the characteristic of the district as well as local knowledge, long-term ethnographic fieldwork including the accompaniment of individuals over periods of several months, a set of mobile methods to increase the number of people covered, and an integrative relational pattern analysis to generalise beyond individual cases (analytic generalisation).The relational analysis of phenomenological, urban anthropological and psychiatric approaches is highly innovative. The project therefore acts collaboratively, i.e. it is being proposed symmetrically by social anthropology and psychiatry. The work programme of the different staff is closely interlinked. Further, the project includes an important participatory component, i.e. mentally affected people are being involved as researchers. This has mainly three reasons: (1) It mirrors the collaborative approach discussed in social anthropology. (2) It responds to recent calls for participation in social psychiatry. (3) It makes access to people with experience of psychosis easier.The project builds on a total of eight years of joint research, amongst others a DFG funded project with social anthropology and psychiatry. The consortium is part of the European Network urban mental health.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants