A discourse analysis of madness in the context of deinstitutionalisation

Abstract

This study used discourse analysis to examine how people made sense of madness in the context of deinstitutionalisation. The focus of the analysis was the ways in which people constructed madness and those defined as mad in their talk, and the ways in which arguments about different types of facilities for those defined as mad were produced. Talk and texts about deinstitutionalisation were gathered from interviews with 11 people involved in the care of the mad, letters and editorials from 5 major New Zealand newspapers, Hansard records of parliamentary debates, and submissions made to a City Council about a proposed community facility for the mad. The interviews were transcribed and then all the texts were entered into a word processor and analysed as one body of discourse using the approach outlined by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell (1987, 1988, 1994). Four discursive objects identified in the texts were analysed: Madness, the Mad, Institutions, and Community Facilities. Several interpretative repertoires emerged from the analysis of each object: Madness was explained with Medical, Psychological, Economic, and Religious interpretative repertoires; the Mad were understood using Dangerous, Vulnerable, Normal, and Outcast repertoires; Institutions were explained with Hospital, Prison, and Asylum repertoires; and Community Facilities were explained in terms of Institution, Home, Liberation, Abandonment, and Philosophy repertoires. Some of the repertoires, for example the Normal interpretative repertoire, were used only to support the new community facilities into which the mad have been moved, while others, such as the Dangerous repertoire, were used only to support institutions. Others, such as the Medical repertoire, were employed to support both styles of service. The ways in which the repertoires functioned and related to each other and to discourses from earlier times are discussed, as are the implications of them being used in talk and texts today.