Ebook: Making It Crazy: An Ethnography of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community

This book explores the psychological, social, and economic facts of life for a group of discharged mental hospital patients living in Madison, Wisconsin. It both explicitly and inferentially raises questions about the rationale for deinstitutionalization. An anthropological field study, the work is the product of two years of intensive observation. It is a revealing enquiry into the lives of people whose welfare the United States has sought to promote by revolutionizing its system of psychiatric care. The book provides an account of the lives and problems of the mentally ill trying to make it in the community. It describes the wide range of coping strategies used by clients in their everyday existence. The book's main contention is that the systems of control, labeling, and rewards all work together to keep these people in their crazy role.