Expressed Emotion and Kin Affects in Mental Health Rehabilitation

In India, the family is integral to mental healthcare. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a psychiatric clinic and a residential rehabilitation centre for people with serious mental illnesses, this article focuses on the effects of kin ties on people’s mental health with implications for their therapeutic rehabilitation. Examining the term ‘expressed emotion’, often deployed by mental health professionals in ‘psy disciplines’ to refer to intrafamilial dynamics, the article shows how kin affects are discursively mediated, practically managed and powerfully felt in sites of mental healthcare. I argue that the process of rehabilitation involves reorienting affective attunement between patients and their family. Such realignments are crucial not only to reorder the patients’ relation with their kin but also with their selves and others in the intersubjective milieu of the rehabilitation facility, in pursuit of a healthy desirable life.