Carceral Politics, Inpatient Psychiatry, and the Pandemic: Risk, Madness, and Containment in COVID-19

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic offers a particularly salient moment in which to identify and reflect on shifts in psychiatric carcerality in highly concrete ways. Drawing from our own professional and practical experience as in-patient (acute-care) psychiatrists implementing changes in ward policies in light of infection control concerns and linking this experience with insights and tensions between Mad Studies, Critical Prison Studies, and the psychiatric writings of Franz Fanon, we focus on specific ways that therapeutic value is undermined within these complicated and complex settings. Using Repo's metaphor of “carceral layers,” our analysis considers how particular infection control policies and practices, institutional approaches to pandemic management, and larger ideologies of risk have worked together to produce spatio-temporal aspects of carcerality in a psychiatric acute-care setting in Toronto, Canada.