Mothers talk about their children with schizophrenia: a performance autoethnography

This article presents the script for a performance autoethnography that explores how mothers of adults with schizophrenia talk about their children. The script draws on my own experience as a mother of a person with schizophrenia, interviews I conducted with mothers of people with schizophrenia, and written accounts by mothers of people with schizophrenia. Autoethnography refers to an approach to social science research in which the experience of the researcher is recognized as a salient part of the research process. Autoethnography typically uses non-traditional genres, such as this script, for presenting research to address ethical and political problems in the representation of research. These genres allow researchers to both break with and continue the ethnographic tradition of representing the lives and experiences of others.