The smoking‐room as psychiatric patients' sanctuary: a place for resistance

Abstract

This article investigates the significance of the smoking-room for psychiatric patients: for their everyday interactions, activities and perceptions of what is meaningful, also for their positioning as agents concerning their own and fellow patients' illnesses and problems. A social constructionist perspective is used as well as concepts anchored in a phenomenology of architecture and local place. This article is a part of ethnographic study of the daily life within a psychiatric ward using participant observation and conversations and interviews with psychiatric inpatient and staff in a psychiatric hospital. Important themes from our analysis were 'smoking-room as patients''panopticon', 'smoking-room as the patients' sanctuary' and 'patient-led treatment'. We discuss these themes within a framework of seeing the smoking-room as an arena for patient and staff resistance. Patients' resistance is analysed as attempts to maintain their civil status identity and feelings of dignity in an otherwise powerless situation.

An ambiguous relationship – a qualitative meta‐synthesis of hospitalized somatic patients’ experience of interaction with fellow patients

“…The patient–patient relationship has been studied in psychiatric settings since the early 1960s (16–18); but interestingly, social research conducted in hospital settings has prioritized to examine the interaction between patients and doctors, patients and nurses, and patients and relatives over patient–patient interaction (19). ‘Interesting’ as Album (14) stated that patients spent approximately 90% of their time in company with fellow patients during hospitalization.…”

Leaving behind the ‘total institution’? Teeth, transcarceral spaces and (re)inscription of the formerly incarcerated body

“…Critiques of the 'total institution' Goffman (1961) defined the 'total institution' as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable length of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life (Goffman 1961, 11). Applied to an extraordinarily diverse range of circumstances and contexts, such as homes for the elderly (Mali 2008), psychiatric units (Skorpen et al 2008), the home (Noga 1991), the mass media (Altheide 1991), the military and the police (Rosenbloom 2011) and sport (Cavalier 2011), its appropriateness as a means of understanding the 'prison' has been widely critiqued; there are disjunctures between the theory and the actuality of imprisonment. Farrington (1992, 6), argues that the 'total institution' thesis is 'in fact, fairly inaccurate as a portrayal of the structure and functioning of the .…”

Staff representations and tobacco‐related practices in a psychiatric hospital with an indoor smoking ban

“…Staff in psychiatric inpatient units might hesitate before questioning patients' tobacco consumption, as it is seen as the expression of freedom and personal choice in an environment where these could be restricted (Skorpen et al . ).…”