Inhabiting (at) the hospital

Drawing on a personal experience and an analysis of hospital environment in its daily functioning, this paper proposes an ethnographic analysis of isolation and modes of internment and monitoring of patients in a psychiatric hospital in Paris. There, the body is often solicited, sometimes subtly constrained – although micro living spaces are provided (e.g. the large garden, the television room, the medical facilities, the rooms whose windows are partly closed by means of chains, etc.). Patients are ceaselessly under surveillance and test the limits of their freedom. The question addressed here is how and why the patients accept – even expect? – such modes of constraint.