Bearing a deceptively modest title, The Psychiatric Team and the Social Definition of Schizophrenia, this book provides a remarkable analysis of psychiatric knowledge and practice in a late twentieth century asylum.

'Ridgehaven Hospital’ is a state institution in Australia undergoing transformations easily recognizable to any who have observed or worked in large psychiatric hospitals in North America or Europe. Once a total institution in Goffman's sense, a place where chronically mentally ill men and women lived out their lives, at the time of Dr. Barrett's research Ridgehaven was progressively reducing the number of its beds, discharging former patients into the community, and exploring new approaches to care. It had come to emphasize relatively brief hospital stays to stabilize the acutely ill, to provide them initial medical and pharmaceutical treatments, and to begin their rehabilitative services. In place of long term hospitalization, most patients were being sent back into the community where they face far less centralized surveillance and care than that provided under the old regime. This book thus provides a report on the status of the asylum and the practices it houses as the era of the ‘Great Confinement’ draws to a close after more than 300 years.

Barrett's book joins Sue Estroff's Making It Crazy and Lorna Rhodes' Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit in analyzing a central component of the mental health system that is emerging as ‘deinstitutionalization’ moves forward. In conversation with the work of Michel Foucault, all three writers demonstrate that institutional powers and surveillance, though diffused, are pervasive in the lives of the mentally ill in the new regime as they were in the old. Barrett's primary interest, however, is not in the asylum as an institution of repression or in “schizophrenia” as a category justifying disciplinary procedures—one line of critical theory stimulated by Foucault's writing. Instead, this work starts from an assumption that institutionalized power is a “productive force which generates categories of knowledge and practice” and undertakes a detailed examination of everyday speaking practices through which ‘schizophrenia’, ‘the schizophrenic’, and ‘the person with schizophrenia’ are constituted as objects of medical practice and a domain of highly specialized knowledge in the contemporary hospital.