Melina Salvador

MELINA A. SALVADOR, then a graduate student at University of California, San Francisco, California, was awarded a grant in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Anticipating Psychosis in the Family: An Ethnographic Study of Kinship and Psychiatric Expertise,’ supervised by Dr. Ian Whitmarsh. 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 dissertation analyzes the ambiguous space being fashioned between psychosis and adolescence and the effects of this effort on people enmeshed in the early psychosis field. This 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 demands on everyday life, relationships and medical practice.