Out-patient institutionalisation

The term institutionalisation describes dehumanising processes by which people with mental illness were assimilated into the workings of large, long-term psychiatric hospitals. Patients were pushed further into deviance by role expectations imposed on them by the asylums’ operational needs, intellectual assumptions and power dynamics. Contemporary clinic structures, ‘checklist’ driven interviews and psychiatric interventionism can induce behaviours in the community analogous to those observed in ‘total institutions’. Many patients now relay and understand their psychological experiences solely through pathologising jargon (e.g. ‘my depression,’ ‘my bipolar’). As soon as a patient is asked, ‘Are you depressed?’ role assumptions and expectations start to concretise.