ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how psychiatric patients and inmates construct discursively their relationship to psychiatric institutions (psychiatric and forensic hospitals). Specifically, the authors focus on recurrent themes that emerge in patients and inmates’narratives as they relate to location, how they index who they are and where they are, how much they long to be there and where they would like to be, with the understanding that defining self “changes with interactants and settings”. Perceptions of self and other emerge in patients and inmates’ narratives as they construct their relationship to a particular place. The authors’ key question examines how participants perform different personal and institutional roles related to a specific location in the construction of meaning in face-to-face interactions. The authors discuss how location as indexicality (Hymes’ physical setting/psychological scene) helps inform the dynamics of self and other, and the construction of situated identities.
