Invisible Marginalities: madness and deinstitutionalisation in austerity Britain

How can one study the geography of invisibility? My project examines how particular marginalities are made invisible in statistics, official discourse and
social theory, by examining the deinstitutionalised mentally ill. The aim is to uncover the relationship between invisibility in discourse, and marginality.
My contention is that this invisibility has real-world consequences. By refusing to recognise the existence of particular groups, liberal states are able to
withdraw their rights. I want to find out which social roles the deinstitutionalised mentally ill are being forced to inhabit (addicts; drunks; homeless etc) in
order to understand how this loss of rights is made ethically 'sensible'. To explore this, I am proposing a long-term ethnographic study of people who
have been 'squeezed out' of mental health services as a result of austerity. Undertaking the challenging task of tracing people who were formerly
institutionalised but whom mental health services have lost contact with, I intend to reveal the mechanisms that make these individuals invisible, and
the consequences of this. By producing the first study of austerity-driven deinstitutionalisation, my aim is to make an original contribution to literature
exploring the production of marginality. This literature has tended to focus on spatial concentrations of marginalised bodies in asylums and urban
spaces; by contrast, my focus is on the role played by dispersal and disappearance.