The "social case": Illness, psychiatry, and deinstitutionalization in postsocialist Romania.

摘要: In this article, I examine the use of an ad hoc medical category—the “social case”—by psychiatrists in contemporary Romania. “Social cases” receive intensive psychiatric care, usually through long institutional stays, remaining hospitalized because perceive them as too poor and, thus, “unfit” to survive without welfare assistance provided by institutionalization. The case” label emerges at intersection (1) plans state deinstitutionalize public mental health (2) rise a new class downwardly mobile and increasingly formerly working-class people, (3) desire protect their patients face neoliberal assaults on Romanian support for publicly funded care. Disability status, illness categories, everyday practices have become battlegrounds struggles over understandings psychological distress illnesses that grip what call “New Poor” postsocialist