Henrik Loodin

Bio: Henrik Loodin is an academic researcher from Lund University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative inquiry & Mental illness. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 7 publications receiving 1017 citations.

Biografier från gränslandet - en sociologisk studie om psykiatrins förändrade kontrollmekanismer

Abstract: The modern era of psychiatry is predominantly a history of confinement. Individuals suffering from mental disorders were banished to asylums and mental hospitals. During the late twentieth century, however, the Swedish psychiatry was a recurring topic for political debate and the target for numerous reforms. At present it is reorganized around three fundamental principles: participation, normalization and integration. The general question that this doctoral dissertation is concerned with is how the control mechanisms of psychiatry have changed in late modern society. It argues that the new psychiatric sector has shifted focus from the organization around the discipline of individuals to the control of their social environment. The aim is to increase societal participation among those with a mental disorder. To this end the dissertation illustrates how the transformation of modern psychiatry – into a new psychiatry – has created a complex organization around persons with a mental illness. The findings of the research are presented in four articles based on life stories told by persons with a psychiatric diagnosis. The articles deal with how psychiatry is turned into an organization in which medical knowledge, political reforms and organizational structures are concretized biographically in the life of the individual. One central aspect of the analysis is the adaptation phase that refugees with posttraumatic stress disorder go through. The overall aim of the articles is to understand how a psychiatric diagnosis intervenes in a life story. The first article analyses the absurdities that arise when a person contract a mental disorder. The article shows that these absurdities emerge when institutions influence the course of events in a patient’s life. The second article focus upon the adaptation phase that refugees with posttraumatic stress disorder must pass before they are included in a new social context. It is showed that the adaptation phase can be more traumatizing than the actual trauma that has been diagnosed. The third article problematizes the tensions between the autobiography of persons in a marginal position, and their biography as patients positioned on a field structured by psychiatric knowledge. In the fourth article it is discussed how the autobiography created by, what is commonly referred to as marginal experiences, may be used to develop existing theories on the construction of the sick role. A key finding in the four articles is that the discrepancy between the new forms of psychiatry and the patients’ life situations, creates a critical element – a borderland – that involves a loss of agency in how the own life is unfolded.

The Absurdalities of Mental Illness - a narrative inquiry into psychiatric diagnosis

Abstract: This text examines three life stories about becoming mentally ill and Albert Camus’ fictive narrative “The Stranger”. The main concern is how the social and psychiatry intervenes in the narrative that the interviewees give. Drawing from a reasoning in Michel Foucaults monograph Madness and Civilization and Dorothy Smiths work on relations of ruling the argument in this article is that when becoming mentally ill one is involved in a process of loosing agency in ones own life story. Illustratively with Camus novel the analysis unravel that the interviewees become strangers in their own life story.

Which architectural style makes an attractive street scape? Aesthetic preferences among city centre managers

Abstract: ABSTRACT Rational design based on aesthetic principles from the 1930s dominates contemporary architecture and property development, contributing to a homogenous urban landscape. The aim of this paper is to examine how professionals involved in city centre development value different architectural styles. Based on a sample of 109 respondents, measuring the architectural preferences of city centre managers, this study indicates that city centre managers view classical architecture in terms of being better for city centres than modernist. The paper suggests that city centre managers can successfully be involved in the design process of attractive streetscapes.

Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets

Abstract: Presented in two parts, this article proposes a research programme devoted to examining ‘processes of economization’. In the first instalment, published in Economy and Society 38(3) (2009), we introduced the notion of ‘economization’. The term refers to the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we discussed the importance, meaning and framing of economization, unravelling its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This second instalment of the article explores what it would mean to move this research programme forward by taking processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, to illustrate what such a project would entail we have limited ourselves to the examination of processes we call ‘marketization’. These p...

Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

Abstract: Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Now 1 1. Blackness: The Human 17 2. Bare Life: The Flesh 33 3. Assemblages: Articulation 46 4. Racism: Biopolitics 53 5. Law: Property 74 6. Depravation: Pornotropes 89 7. Deprivation: Hunger 113 8. Freedom: Soon 125 Notes 139 Bibliography 181 Index 205

The Social Construction of Illness Key Insights and Policy Implications

Abstract: The social construction of illness is a major research perspective in medical sociology. This article traces the roots of this perspective and presents three overarching constructionist findings. First, some illnesses are particularly embedded with cultural meaning—which is not directly derived from the nature of the condition—that shapes how society responds to those afflicted and influences the experience of that illness. Second, all illnesses are socially constructed at the experiential level, based on how individuals come to understand and live with their illness. Third, medical knowledge about illness and disease is not necessarily given by nature but is constructed and developed by claims-makers and interested parties. We address central policy implications of each of these findings and discuss fruitful directions for policy-relevant research in a social constructionist tradition. Social constructionism provides an important counterpoint to medicine’s largely deterministic approaches to disease and ...

Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality

Abstract: One defining quality of our current moment is its characteristic state of anticipation, of thinking and living toward the future. Anticipation has epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast. It is a politics of temporality and affect. Key dimensions are: injunction as the moral imperative to characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty; abduction as requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts and presents, framing templates for producing the future; optimization as the moral responsibility of citizens to secure their ‘best possible futures’; preparedness as living in ‘preparation for’ potential trauma; and possibility as ‘ratcheting up’ hopefulness, especially through technoscience. Anticipation is the palpable sense that things could be (all) right if we leverage new spaces of opportunity, reconfiguring ‘the possible.’ We illustrate exemplary sites of anticipatory practice, especially biomedical, highlighting how such sites are gendered, increasingly implicating young girls.