Self-Cutting Among Anti-Psychiatric Healing Collectives in Spain

This proposed ethnographic project will examine self-harm, peer-support, and political advocacy among anti-psychiatric feminist collectives in Spain, with a view to understanding emerging forms of grass-roots mental healthcare and the implications these may have for clinicians. I will consider the ways in which self-cutting can be conceived of as a social act that implicates others, and ask how the embodied private, social, and political practises of people experiencing psychiatric symptoms can challenge both psychiatric treatment regimes, and notions of self/other boundaries in a discourse that otherwise designates the individual as pathological . This project aims to reduce social stigma faced by people with psychiatric conditions, and explore what can be learned from alternate approaches to addressing psychic distress and self-cutting, by specifically outlining the impacts of agential bleeding (bleeding that is, to some extent, chosen) on individuals, social networks, and political processes.