ABSTRACT
This chapter critically looks at the interface of biomedical psychiatry with the everyday lives of women who have been diagnosed as ‘mentally ill’. While critically engaging with psychiatry as a dominant form of knowledge and understanding its intervention in the everyday lives of women, we need to further look into the minute sociological aspects of that relationship. How do women internalize that classic relationship? What are the ways or tactics they use to negotiate their everyday lives where psychiatric intervention has been normalized? When the mental health system places a person in the category of the ‘diagnosed’, it insinuates itself into the minute actions at the level of everyday. This chapter thus examines the ‘experiences’ of mental illness through a close examination of the everyday in which they are engaged in. When I say ‘women’s experience’, I do not mean any essentialist self-evident experience of women or assume them as a homogenized category. I intend to understand the different structures and processes through which these experiences are constructed when biomedical psychiatry becomes an important component. These processes constitute a very important part of the everyday lives of women who have been diagnosed as mentally ill.
