Understanding schizophrenia and relapse from persons who experience it: an oral history

Abstract

The biomedical model characterizes schizophrenia as a psychotic disorder, with periods of remission and relapse and is the dominant paradigm to frame the experience of schizophrenia. Patients have been afforded few opportunities to include their perspectives and understandings into this dominant framework. This study addresses this and asks the question: How do people diagnosed with schizophrenia understand their experience with schizophrenia and relapse? Foucauldian notions of discourse, power and resistance informed the analysis and interpretation of the in-depth oral history interviews. The findings of this study emphasis the dominance of the biomedical discourse, illustrate how all participants are caught up in the discourse, explore the socialization process that the narrators went through in taking up the discourse and examine the instances of resistance to the discourse: a sense of 'is there anything else?’

These aspects make up an understanding of the experience of schizophrenia and relapse from the individual's perspective.