While reading the work of Lisa Guenther on solitary confinement as a form of social death many thoughts came into my mind. Lisa Guenther analyzed the violence in solitary confinement through a the lens of critical phenomenology. She argued that solitary confinement destroys the intersubjective bodily relations on which personhood depends through the “the prolonged deprivation of a concrete, everyday experience of other people.” When the sense of individuated personhood threatens to dissolve in such experiences, people tend to have the same symptoms: anxiety, confusion, depression, hallucinations, fatigue, headaches and uncontrollable trembling. Do these symptoms sound familiar?
Deriving from the work on solitary confinement, the experience of violence as a solitary event and the idea of critical phenomenology that individuated personhood is intersubjected (i.e. subjectivity is not fixed, rather constantly (co)constructed in time and in space by and with others), I argue that mental disorders can be viewed as an extreme, violent disruption of intersubjectivity which can lead to a solitary experience of one’s self. Mental disorders is the result of fractured joints of an embodied, interrelational subjectivity, mirroring the experience of individuals in solitary confinement. Once one’s sense of individuated personhood is threatened to dissolve, mental disorders, with a highly dysfunctional symptomatology, serve as an extreme warning in order the what’s-left-of sense of self to be back connected with the external world, with others.
Individuals with mental disorders often find themselves in a state of emotional and psychological solitude, isolated from the shared constructions of social life. These individuals cannot connect meaningful with others leading to a survival mode of relying solely on the resources of one’s own subjectivity. This is not sufficient for our human existence. If neither subjects nor objects have substance or meaning outside of the field of relations, then how one may survive outside of these relations? Thus, mental disorders should not be described as a living social death, but rather as a condition in limbo where people seek their connection back to the world.
Nowadays many social structures condemn people to a sense of a Cartesian self that is valued and tied upon by its materialistic substance. Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism to name a few. Many social groups are condemned to marginalization within the broader societal frameworks, creating a dense of alienation. This disconnection leads easier to a disordering of bodily relations, communal space and power relations. Besides, bodies and spaces are interdependent in such a way that this interdependence makes them vulnerable to disordering. A body that is forced in a straitjacket of a psychiatric clinic is ‘in’ the building of the clinic in a way that profoundly alters the dynamics of autonomy, agency and embodied experience, introducing a complex interplay between the individual, the ‘therapeutic’ environment and the relationship with the world.
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