The glass cage: an ethnography of exposure in schizophrenia

This article draws upon anthropological research conducted with a group of people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and are living in a major Australian city. The analysis aims to show how these men and women experience their bodies at a day-to-day level, focusing on how they talk about their bodies, awareness of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the lived world. Rather than rely on established psychiatric classificatory models of interpretation, experiences are relocated within a broader framework of embodiment and social practice. The article argues that schizophrenia is not solely a 'disorder of the mind', but an experience which embodies and reproduces a multiplicity of cultural meanings associated with the concept of privacy. Through the close examination of one case study, the cultural logic of privacy is unpacked and shown to be at the core of many bodily experiences associated with schizophrenia. Reinterpreting such experiences in this light has implications for the ways in which those with schizophrenia are understood and treated