ABSTRACT
Foregrounding the institutional setting of mental healthcare is methodologically challenging. This is because accountable bureaucracies are not places of candour. Staff members in accountable bureaucracies produce documentation to satisfy inspectors and enable market mechanisms, all of which are promotional, and not always entirely sincere. Ultimately, they reassure the general public, but they do so by a certain amount of dissembling, and the creation of a lot of open and semi-open secrets. This book adopts collaborative ethnographic methods because they are suited to this difficult methodological terrain. Collaboration makes us alert to the disingenuousness of bureaucratic working. This suggests that the purpose of the book is not so much to gather fresh data as to describe things many people know already, but which are not framed in such a way that they can be included in formal research.
