Psychiatric Care as an Other-than-Human Entanglement: Anthropological Reflections on Forest Therapy

Abstract

What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and sensory experience, I analyse the role of trees and forests in a Swiss in-patient psychiatric clinic. Using ethnographic vignettes and introducing the forest as a therapeutic landscape, I discuss the role of trees in a ward’s day-to-day life, a psychiatric sufferer’s modes of self-perception in the forest, and a physiotherapist’s active ‘tinkering’. My central argument addresses a problematic element in the research on psychiatric care in Switzerland: it is largely devoid of anthropological attentiveness to sensory perception and the atmospheric. I propose an alternative view where the experiences of illness, recovery, and violence are fundamentally co-created by a sensory context—including its marginalised, nonhuman, and atmospheric dimensions—and a conceptual framework informed by an anthropological adaption of feminist notions of ‘matters of care’ as well as sensory and ecological anthropology.