The specifics of ethnographic approaches to mental health research are examined, highlighting the motives why the type of knowledge produced by ethnography is relevant to the context of Psychiatric Reform and the biomedicalization of existence. The discussion is focused on interpretation-based ethnography in the field of mental health, stressing the theoretical and methodological foundations of a comprehensive form of apprehending the scope of mental health as an object akin to a clinic of the individual. The centrality of social and cultural aspects in the ethnographic approach and the inflexions mediated by the type of ethnographic methodological undertaking is stressed. Lastly, the ethnography of madness is seen as a fitting example that substantiates some of these characteristics. The contention is that accessing psychotic persons (and others who may speak about these experiences) from varied areas of their daily life, situated in their various social inscriptions, while confronting these interpretations with other interpretative dimensions of their social reality and within the logic linked to local psychologies, is a pertinent procedure, from whence certain aspects of an understanding of madness (or causes of its incomprehension) can emerge.
Ethnography; Mental health; Psychosis; Methodology; Interpretative anthropology