ABSTRACT
The “observation” presents a vivid description of a community meeting in which the patients demonstrate their disturbance and frustration. For the most part it is only their voices that we hear. So, from the outset, I found myself wondering what was understood by the term “community”, and whether the patients or staff belonged to it in any meaningful sense. The theme of anonymity and the poverty of relatedness pervades the account from the very outset. For example, I was struck by the generic reference to “nurse”, as if the nurses could not in any way be differentiated, by gender, age, or ethnicity or indeed by name. The ward manager’s absence from the community meeting seemed to express something powerful about the utility of this meeting in the manager’s mind. What is revealed systemically is a repeated failure of connections or communications, and an absence of relatedness between those involved.
