Broken Record: An Arts-Informed Autoethnography of Adolescent Institutionalization

“Broken Record” is a Masters Research Project in which I explore my experience in an adolescent psychiatric institution using an arts-informed autoethnographic method. The final project is a 200-page artistic exploration of language, meaning, identity, and psychiatry. This component of the research outlines the critical objectives of the project and grounds the work in a body of existing literature. The primary contribution of the paper is its presentation of Madness as Method, a distinct approach to autoethnographic research on madness and psychiatric survival that mobilizes mad subjectivity to generate knowledge from a place of embodiment, distress, memory work, and academic research. I outline this methodology at length, identifying and exploring its four stages: unravelling, integration, narrative, and reckoning. I conclude this paper by situating my Masters Research Project in the context of my Masters training and my professional goals beyond the academy.