Introduction to the Project: IE Researchers Take on Psychiatry

Abstract

This book contains a series of institutional ethnography inquiries into psychiatry. This being the introduction, by the time this chapter ends, you will have a good idea about what you will find in this book—that is, what themes run through it, what each chapter covers or attempts to make visible, what institutional ethnography (IE) itself is, why IE is being applied to psychiatry, and what the purpose of the book and the project are. Systematically, making all this visible and intelligible, such is the work of this chapter. To begin with the last of these, for we have already dipped into these waters, as suggested in the foregoing, the purpose of this book and the project underlying it is: (1) to shed a critical light on psychiatry and (2) to bring the power of institutional ethnography to bear in the process. In addition, the purpose of the project per se is to help those critically aware, especially those already involved in antipsychiatry or 'mad' activism, to acquire a highly serviceable new tool with which to expose psychiatry; and also to swell the ranks of psychiatry's able critics by attracting old hands at IE into the area. The book, in this regard, is both an educational product and a way of injecting new life into a liberatory movement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)