Race, gender and psychosis: ‘psycho-racial architectures of disordered sociality'

What I intend to do in this chapter is to discuss the nature of the relationship between what might be understood and formulated as ‘psychosis’, race and gender. The nature of discourses around the mind-body connection in the generalised biomedical and psychiatric arenas often disqualifies the presence of the societally formulated self, which is the subject and object of the psychosis-generating, (and therefore ‘disordered meaning making’) gaze.

Rather than assume that racialised gendered groups’ mental illness issues are a problem sourced within the psychiatrised and medicalised individual, here I would like to ask questions about the psychosis-gender-race relation which might otherwise remain at the periphery of the debate. There is no shortage of biomedical and statistical evidence of illness and mortality rates within and between different ethnic / racial groups. However, instead of regurgitating and in a sense re-performing reifying analytical acts of categorical thinking, this chapter aims to extend and somewhat distort the established vista by integrating some ideas that might be helpful, in the most troublesome, counter-hegemonic way. Psychosis then, as an experience, and episode of troubled living, rather than seen as a bio-chemical, biomedical, and deviant rationality sources entity, can from a more socio-historical critical gaze, be regarded as a trick of modernity itself, rather than a trick of the mind.