Beyond therapeutics: Psychosis and poetics

Abstract

In this article, I examine how poetry serves as a form of semiotic rearrangement for those undergoing episodes of what psychiatry calls psychosis. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, I explore how poetry's capacity to hold intemporal experiences facilitates an ambiguous economics of meaning that serves as a semiotic container for supposedly disordered speech. While poetry is frequently recognized as a therapeutic tool for its expressive process, my analysis extends beyond discussions of expression, release, and meaning-making. Instead, I shift the focus toward the potential of rearrangement that gives form to the ambiguous terrain of everyday life for those experiencing episodes of psychosis. Furthermore, when exploring experiences of psychosis, traditional anthropological modes of inquiry fall short. Poetry offers anthropologists an alternative mode of ethnographic engagement—one that may foster a more ethical and intentionally opaque approach to representation, description, and relationality. The opacity of poetry may illuminate something unconcealed about anthropology itself.