The psychiatric fix

Med Anthropol Q. 2025 Nov 30:e70043. doi: 10.1111/maq.70043. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This article draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles’ (LA) jail mental health facility to describe the interrelated crises of rising numbers of people declared incompetent to stand trial and the recurrent failure of managing madness in jail. It draws on the concept of a “spatial fix,” which refers to provisional solutions that displace, without resolving, systemic problems while, in fact, creating new ones. Within LA’s carceral system, psychiatry has offered one such “fix”: institutional and extra-institutional actors have mobilized the personnel, discourses, and technologies of psychiatry to manage the carceral system’s apparent excesses. However, such a mobilization of psychiatry deepens, rather than resolves, these crises, while ideologically and spatially securing the wider carceral social order. This psychiatric fix, thus, has important implications for understanding how psychiatric power sustains, reproduces, and extends the shape-shifting US carceral state.

PMID:41320790 | DOI:10.1111/maq.70043