Madness and Poverty in Toronto: A Narrative Analysis.

Abstract

This research is a culmination of my experience with Madness and its presence in the world. I question what it means to experience mental health ‘trouble’ in a world that seeks to live under the guise of normalcy. Trouble, as I can most clearly navigate it, happens when something steps outside of the boundaries of normalcy. When life is experienced by an individual as something outside of social convention, the individual becomes ‘marked’ with difference based on a shared perspective of what is correct. My doctoral research therefore examines this phenomenon to understand how one lives a ‘spoiled identity’ in a world that seems to be in defiance of it. I carry out a narrative analysis of textual data to question the unquestioned and ubiquitous presence of mental health narratives within contemporary Western culture. I have not lived in poverty but I take up its narrative in connection to Madness as an intrinsic precursor to something amiss in our society. In addressing these social inequalities, I utilize key conceptual tools such as stigma/spoiled identity, narrative prosthesis, and the interplay between ‘I’ and ‘We’ narratives. As an Interpretive Sociologist, I use the lenses of ethnomethodology and phenomenology to engage in this discussion. The data collected explores and combines the individual and social experience, with Madness and poverty being the phenomena that depict this understanding. My data comes from present- day Toronto newspapers and mental healthcare programming information packages collected from four research sites in Toronto. I utilize newspapers as an object of my research because of their powerful role in narrating public and dominant views. I couple these narratives with an analysis of mental healthcare programming information packages to see where these dominant views appear within society-at-large.