Melina Salvador

The U.S. has seen a proliferation of early psychosis clinics serving young people who may be experiencing warning signs or early symptoms of psychotic illness, but who may not have ever had a “full” episode of psychosis. Building on two robust fields of scholarship on adolescence and psychosis, this book analyzes the ambivalent space being fashioned between psychosis and adolescence and the effects of this effort on people enmeshed in the early psychosis field. The study is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork across two university-based early psychosis clinics. It examines how distinctions at the incipient edge of psychotic experience, made by individuals, families, and psychiatry, create new modes for understanding psychiatric practice and everyday life. In the book I argue that as ever more precise and certain conceptualizations of progressively earlier-stage psychosis are pursued there is a risk of losing sight of what exceeds this increasingly narrow view. Such narrowing has implications for young people, families, and clinicians who are asked to speak the truth of psychosis when their truth is already radically in doubt. Early psychosis also impacts generalized notions of adolescent experience. This unprecedented fieldwork offers new insights into anthropological understandings of psychosis, adolescence, and subjectivity.