This article sheds light on autoethnographic accounts of mental illness, to address author and reader concerns and questions and to consider what practitioners can learn from these narrative accounts. Drawing from my own and others’ trajectories, I discuss the drawbacks and dangers of exposing a ‘flawed’ identity, the stigma of serious mental illness, intertextuality issues, the tangled nature of revelation and redemption, framing the ‘Other’ in mental illness autoethnography and depictions of ‘life in the asylum.’ I explain how in telling my own ‘psychiatric’ tale, I looked to the symbolic concept of ‘communitas’ as a means of examining inter-relational processes and collective experience in a psychiatric facility. I argue that, while the act of writing about one’s illness experience can be rightly perceived as a way of reclaiming personal ‘power’ and facilitating healing, attempts to ‘evidence’ recovery can run counter to the writer’s reality of life with or beyond mental illness as personally and socially messy. In answer to the question, ‘at what point does a ‘life in the asylum’ narrative become autoethnographic?' I argue for the potential of autoethnography to contribute to broader sociological, ethnographic and medical debates and thus impact on policy. Speaking up about mental health through autoethnography can help to promote awareness of the unpredictability and socially constructed nature of mental illness and can inform strategies toward reducing public stigma, tackle the cyclical impact of labels, highlight the need to change social and medical attitudes, and revisualize treatment and support.

这篇文章阐明了精神疾病的自我民族志描述，以解决作者和读者的担忧和问题，并考虑从业者可以从这些叙述性描述中学到什么。从我自己和他人的轨迹出发，我讨论了暴露“有缺陷”身份的弊端和危险、严重精神疾病的耻辱、互文性问题、启示和救赎的纠结本质，在精神疾病自我民族志中构建“他者”以及对“庇护生活”的描绘。我解释了在讲述我自己的“精神病学”故事时，我如何将“社区”的象征性概念视为检查精神病院中的相互关系过程和集体经验的一种手段。我认为，虽然写一个人的疾病经历的行为可以正确地被视为一种恢复个人“力量”和促进康复的方式，但试图“证明”康复可能与作者在个人和社会上患有或超越精神疾病的生活现实背道而驰乱。在回答这个问题时，“在什么时候‘收容所的生活’叙事变成了自我民族志？” 我认为自我民族志的潜力有助于更广泛的社会学、民族志和医学辩论，从而对政策产生影响。通过自我民族志谈论心理健康有助于提高人们对精神疾病的不可预测性和社会建构性质的认识，并可以为减少公众污名的策略提供信息，解决标签的周期性影响，强调改变社会和医疗态度的必要性，