Russian dolls and epistemic crypts: A lived experience reflection on epistemic injustice and psychiatric confinement

Abstract

Seclusion and restraint are the psychiatric practices most often considered in the context of ‘confinement’. This paper argues that confinement goes beyond just locked places, describing experiences of epistemic confinement, where people's personal truth can be locked up inside the dominance of biogenetic psychiatric narratives which frame contextual distress as ‘mental illness’. The author draws on her lived experience and perspective as a survivor academic, first to reflect on the University of Melbourne workshop ‘Confinement: Spaces and practices of care and control’, and then to consider personal experiences and implications of confinement. Both bodily and epistemic confinement are explored, including how these were experienced in the midst of emotional crises, the ways in which confinement worsened and reinforced distress, and its enduring impacts. It is proposed that bodily and epistemic confinement can cause serious, lasting trauma. The validity of confinement is questioned, in a sector which purportedly seeks therapeutic outcomes. Resistance is briefly examined as a reasonable, predictable and perhaps therapeutically beneficial response to these injustices. It is proposed that tackling epistemic injustice in confinement necessitates academic partnering with survivors, to coproduce new ways of knowing.