Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Relegating Psychosis: Blood Work and “Routine Connection” in the Clozapine Clinic
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Relegating Psychosis: Blood Work and “Routine Connection” in the Clozapine Clinic
Do you wish to request the book?
Relegating Psychosis: Blood Work and “Routine Connection” in the Clozapine Clinic
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Relegating Psychosis: Blood Work and “Routine Connection” in the Clozapine Clinic
2020
Overview
This paper attends to the sociality available in the clozapine clinic regimen and suggests that the social dimensions of clozapine treatment may be as important as the biochemical efficacy of clozapine. The clozapine clinic is where people diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia who take the antipsychotic clozapine go for routine monitoring of clozapine side effects, particularly haematological effects. Psychopharmaceutical treatments are often criticized for being reductionistic and dehumanizing, but clozapine clinics offer increased clinical contact in the age of deinstitutionalization. The inadvertent social benefits of biomedically reductive treatments have not previously been ethnographically attended to in the clozapine-only context. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 43 clozapine clients and 16 clinical caregivers in two clozapine clinics in the United Kingdom in Australia, I argue that routine clinical attachments in the clozapine clinic can serve a therapeutic role in terms of providing opportunities for clients’ health agency, social competence and accountability. This socio-therapeutic quality appeared to be available because the clinical emphasis was not on psychotic illness. It depended, however, on reliable and familiar social exchanges inside the clinic and on the predictability of clinical activity. The importance of unemotional but unfailing relationships and rhythms in the clozapine clinic context echoes cross-cultural findings about how schizophrenia is managed more productively in environments that invite more neutral and equal social exchanges.
