The Booklet
The visual-text booklet weaves together interview dialogue and personal imagery into an intimate archive.
The booklet accompanies the unpublished research, “Beyond Symptom Suppression: Psychoanalytic Perspectives and Alternative Approaches to Psychosis at Le 388,” examining Le 388 - an outpatient clinic in Québec that provides an innovative model for the treatment of psychosis, with interventions rooted in psychoanalysis that prioritize humanization and subjectivity over symptom suppression.
The textual source is the 2019 interview with the Lacanian founders of Le 388 by Chris Vanderwees - structurally disrupted, presenting only key statements from the text using a process of highlighting and erasure (inspired by collaborator Eliza Lu Doyle). Images have been sourced from unused 2014 documentary footage of a journey across the United States to search for alternative treatment facilities for psychosis. I’ve extracted screenshots (fragments of visual memory) and the images have been woven into the text. The cut-outs within the images mirror the opposite text. This represents sensations of erasure, accounting for those disappeared by our systems as well as the recent loss of Le 388 (closed March 2025). This visual project became an attempt to merge time and space.
Project Details
There are multiple perspectives on the nature of psychosis, its causes, and how it should be addressed. My inquiry focuses on the underlying philosophies that shape treatment approaches and how individuals experiencing psychosis are perceived and treated within our society. At the heart of this work is an investigation into the dehumanizing frameworks that often shape psychiatric treatment and the lived realities of those experiencing psychosis; and my questions revolve around the systemic tendency to marginalize these individuals and the critical importance for those individuals to reclaim their sense of subjectivity.
Taking a note from art-based research, I see this project as a form of inquiry that moves beyond intellect into sensation and intuition, allowing for a multiplicity of perspectives and a form of knowledge that is felt, not just reasoned. Those with psychosis often communicate through non-verbal forms: gesture, pattern, symbol, and sound. Psychosis resists conventional language – it speaks in symbols, fractured syntax/language, silence, and with the body. This work tries to meet it – mirroring the language system of psychosis itself: layered, nonlinear, and symbolic. I believe empathy, especially the kind that emerges through embodied experience, is essential to rethinking these frameworks.
Visually, I draw on footage from a 2014 journey I took with a sibling (who struggles with schizophrenia) across the country, searching for treatment facilities for psychosis. This was one of the longest and most intimate stretches of time we spent together, during a period when his life was shaped by institutions and short, fragmented visits. I filmed our travels, capturing our exchanges, glimpses of his world, and the essence of his humanity. Given my experience, this trip was front of my mind while reading this interview about the work and perspectives of the founders of Le 388. While reading, I wished I could go back in time 11 years. I created a visual booklet in response to my research, learning, and attention. I believe that a multi-leveled work can open a more intimate, human understanding – one that invites us to feel alongside, not just look in from afar. By merging research and artistic expression, this project becomes an act of inquiry and resistance, asking for the integration of new perspectives and a reconceptualization of care for those with psychosis.
Unpublished research draft can be provided upon request.
Research advised by Daniel Garner (Ph.D SW, Hunter College). Iinterview with Christopher Chamberlin (Lacanian Psychoanalyst, La 388, Group for Independent Formation). Unpublished research can be provided upon request (Literature review including Moncrief, R.D. Laing, Institutional Psychiatry and La Borde, Danielle Knafo, GIFRIC, and the founders of Le 388).