Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma

Constructing a “Schizophrenic” Identity

Schizophrenia is one of the more incomprehensible conditions to afflict mankind. It is hard to express just how cruel and tragic schizophrenia is for both individuals and their families. It is estimated to affect approximately 1 per cent of the population (Torrey 2001) and occurs in normal, intelligent people from all walks of life. It occurs in every society and culture, and some observers believe it has been part of the human condition since ancient times (e.g., Shorter 1997). There have been a number of ways of talking about schizophrenia over the centuries: individuals were thought to be possessed by the devil or be in the grip of mysterious powers. Now, of course, we no longer think of the devil when we think of madness, but over the course of the twentieth century, there have been a number of ways of viewing schizophrenia: as a result of unconscious conflicts; as a creative response to an untenable family situation; as a sane response to an insane world; as a result of poor parenting or schizophrenogenic mothers; as a response to being labelled; and so on (e.g., Laing 1969; Szasz 1972; Scheff 1975). Now, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the medical version of schizophrenia as a brain illness, “a broken brain” (Andreason 1984), has become the dominant , perhaps the only available, discourse for understanding schizophrenia . Certainly the medical discourse is hegemonic. Edward Shorter (1997), in his history of psychiatry, describes the biological approach—“treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry”— as a “smashing success” (vii). In this essay, I examine the personal narratives of people with schizophrenia to show how people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia 129 barbara schneider Constructing a “Schizophrenic” Identity use this medical discourse as a resource in the construction of identity. Although the medical discourse for understanding schizophrenia is, for all practical purposes, the only one available, and it would seem that individuals have very little choice in taking it up as a way to understand themselves and their behaviour, this is, nevertheless, something that people actively do, rather than something that just happens to them. It is this active process of taking up medical discourse to describe experience that I examine here. I begin by outlining my theoretical approach to understanding how identity is constructed in personal narratives, and then examine extracts from interviews I conducted with people with schizophrenia to illustrate how medical discourse is both taken up and resisted in the narrative construction of a “schizophrenic” identity. Narrative Practice and Identity Identity is an extremely complex construct that has been defined in a number of different ways in a variety of literatures (see Holstein and Gubrium [2000], and Widdicombe [1998], for detailed discussions). Here, I shall draw on a view of identity as something that is narratively constructed and communicated (Chase 2005; Daiute and Lightfoot 2004; Holstein and Gubrium 2000). As George Rosenwald and Richard Ochberg observe, “Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned” (1992, 1). Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein’s (1998) notion of narrative practice elaborates this active process of identity construction and its relation to the social circumstances in which particular stories are told. They use the term “narrative practice” to “characterize simultaneously the activities of storytelling, the resources used to tell the stories, and the auspices under which stories are told” (164). In this view, narratives are not simply reports of “the facts” of past or present experience. Rather, they are artful, situated constructions assembled to describe and constitute, or ascribe meaning to, experience in particular ways. In an “interplay of discursive actions and the circumstances of storytelling” (Gubrium and Holstein 1998, 164), storytellers select those aspects of experience that are relevant to a particular circumstance of storytelling and to the construction of a particular identity from a vast memory storehouse of life events. Personal narratives, however, are not simply individual productions; rather, they are, as Catherine Kohler Riessman puts it, “both an individual and a social product” (1992, 232). Stories are mediated and constrained by the local and institutional circumstances of the storytelling 130 representing the subject and by available social and cultural resources, which people draw on to shape their stories, and their identities, in particular ways. Andrew Giddens (1991) uses the term “institutional reflexivity” to refer...