Truth-Telling, Aging, and Healing From Institutional Psychiatric Violence: A Life Story and Mad Studies Perspective

During the last decades of the 20th century, large-scale psychiatric institutions were dismantled. This “deinstitutionalization” was connected to efforts to end institutional violence. Former inmates, however, had institutional violence inscribed into their bodies and souls. This article is written by one of them, 87-year-old Swedish psychiatry survivor, Gunnel Bergstrand, together with researcher Elisabeth Punzi. They explore how Gunnel’s stay at a dismantled Swedish psychiatric institution in 1956 affected her whole life and how she struggled to find a listener. We frame our work in a life story perspective and in the recently developed discipline of Mad studies, which challenges psychiatric terminologies and interventions and reclaims expertise based on the knowledge of those with lived experiences, past and present.