ABSTRACT
This chapter asks ‘How shall we engage with the lived experiences of psychiatry patients?’ It is written from the perspective of an ethnographer (who becomes a trainee psychiatrist) faced with making meaning out of the daily existential dilemmas of patients. Prior to treatment regimes, are there regimes of significance that allow entry into another’s world that honours various forms of placement and displacement? Can we stand alongside patients as Other, rather than standing over them? The chapter highlights the repetition of small units that constitute an action, as a kind of ‘being-held’. There is purposeful experiment with form to give a concrete sense of the clinical encounter’s shifting uncertainties, as poetic work enacted. What is it to feel the worldview of a ‘patient’ beyond technical empathy, a patient who in turn is responding to your presence largely through affect, in often highly unpredictable flux (or, in some psychiatric patients, an extraordinary and chilling lack of affect)?
