This study brings together socio-theoretical and ethnographic approaches to psychiatry, demonstrating the role of the clinic as a major consolidator of ideologies as well as the site where personal miseries are registered as markers of social failure. It focuses on innovation in psychiatric taxonomies, changes in the figurative language of the emotions, changes in conceptualizations of the self and how all of these relate to changing socio-economic events and circumstances.

This study brings together socio-theoretical and ethnographic approaches to psychiatry, demonstrating the role of the clinic as a major consolidator of ideologies as well as the site where personal miseries are registered as markers of social failure. It focuses on innovation in psychiatric taxonomies, changes in the figurative language of the emotions, changes in conceptualizations of the self and how all of these relate to changing socio-economic events and circumstances.