Negotiating Culture and the Self: Complications of Agency in Psychosis

The goal of the dissertation project described here is to explore and unpack the role of agency, understood as a form of intentionalized action (Ortner, 1996), in participants\u27 experiences of psychosis and associated narratives and explanations of these experiences. We present in-depth cthnographically-infom1cd qualitative analyses of the accounts of 14 participants, organized around the interimplication of agency in and with the overlapping domains of symptomatology, narrative, and explanation. Our analyses suggest that the play of agency in psychosis is far richer and more nuanced than most existing scholarship suggests, underscoring the value of greater attention to agentive complexities involved in the structuring, re-structuring and negotiation of symptoms as well as discursive processes of culturally-engaged sense-making