Generating Sociality through the Senses in Movement and Music Therapy among People with Recurrent Psychosis

Abstract

Psychosis analyzed from a phenomenological orientation is a disembodied experience that involves a constant negotiation of self and reality. For people experiencing recurrent psychoses, its medicalisation and stigmatisation further complicate the relationship of self, medication, and society, as shown by the political economy of psychosis. In these cases where full recovery from the illness may not be possible, I reconceptualise psychosis as a pastime: a strategy to coexist with rather than be defined by the illness experience. Accordingly, I turn towards non-pharmacological interventions; arts-based therapies, such as dance and music, have been shown to benefit people with psychosis by reestablishing their experience of reality within the body and empowering them to regain control over their lives and interpersonal relationships. In my ethnography of the Psychosis Therapy Project (PTP) based in Islington, London, UK, which serves people with recurrent psychoses, I explore how its movement and music therapies work towards re-embodiment using bodily techniques of heat, synchronicity, synesthesia, and the transportive role of music. Thus, I take a sensory anthropological approach to sociality that also decenters vision as the main sense in healing—to be well is to feel well rather than just to look well. Finally, my fieldwork presents a case where a service user, who regularly participates in the movement group, manages psychosis as a pastime through practical and social enskilment. Ultimately, my work strives to demedicalise and destigmatise the lived experience of psychosis and honour the legacy of the PTP.