Disciplined into good conduct: Gender constructions of users in a municipal psychiatric context in Sweden

Aims and objectives

To examine how gendered discursive norms and notions of masculinity and femininity were (re)produced in professional conversations about users of long‐term municipality psychiatric care. Focus is on the staff’s use of language in relation to gender constructions.

Background

Psychiatric care in Sweden has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades from custodian care in large hospitals to a care mainly located in a municipal context. People who need psychiatric care services often live in supporting houses. In municipal psychiatric care, staff conduct weekly professional meetings to discuss daily matters and the users’ needs. Official reports of the Swedish government have shown that staff in municipal care services treat disabled women and men differently. Studies exploring gender in relation to users of long‐term psychiatric care in municipalities have problematised the care and how staff, through language, construct users’ gender. Therefore, language used by staff is a central tool for ascribing different gender identities of users.

Design

The content of speech derived from audio recordings were analysed using Foucauldian discursive analysis. The COREQ checklist was used in this article.

Results

The results indicate that by relying on gender discourses, staff create a conditional care related to how the users should demonstrate good conduct. In line with that, an overall discourse was created: Disciplined into good conduct. It was underpinned by three discourses inherent therein: The unreliable drinker and the confession, Threatened dignity, Doing different femininities.

Conclusion

The community psychiatric context generates a discourse of conduct in which staff, via spoken language (re)produces gendered patterns and power imbalances as a means to manage daily work routines. Such practices of care, in which constant, nearly panoptic, control despite the intention to promote autonomy, urgently require problematising current definitions of good conduct and normality.