Neil Gong - Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness...

Please note: the entrance to the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis is on Livingston St. Upon arrival please ring "3rd Floor Reception" for entry and head up via elevator to the 3rd floor.

Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles

This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public safety net providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in J*il, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts Medic*tion refusal and drug use so long as undesired behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, I show how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and control a form of privilege.

Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (University of Chicago Press 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (OxfordUniversity Press 2020). Neil's public writings have appeared in such venues as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times.

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Psychosis in the City is a series curated by Dr. Christopher Landry, a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic candidate at Columbia University, and a Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Community Psychoanalysis Grant Recipient. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community supporting recovery for people with Serious Mental Illness, and co-founder of the Constellation Program, a psychoanalytically-informed treatment program for young adults experiencing psychosis and extreme states.

With the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis Chris is working on three interrelated endeavors. The Foundation supports the Constellation Program as a space for 1:1 therapy as well as group work facilitated by Isaiah Madison. Chris also organizes the Working Group for Community Mental Health Workers and he leads the speaker series Psychosis in the City, produced in collaboration with the Greene Clinic Speaker Series, hosted at the Foundation space.

Host or Publisher The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis