Social defeat in recovery-oriented supported housing: moral experience, stigma, and ideological resistance

Drawing from ethnographic observations and interview data gathered during 6 months working as a home caregiver at the Pinewood Apartments, a recovery-oriented supported housing community in Texas, I demonstrate how stigma and social defeat were moral and social processes that pervaded life for all involved, including service providers. Yet, because of the extreme power differentials that characterized tenant-staff relationships, the assault of stigma and social defeat was much more frequent, existentially intense, and morally and materially consequential for certain tenants, whose attempts at ideological resistance were delegitimized by service providers, including myself, who were backed by the authority of dominant psychiatric and moralistic discourses concerning the inherent irrationality and irresponsibility of people with severe mental illness. Nevertheless, due to the indeterminate and at times inharmonious nature of moral experience, it is not my intention to portray tenants as wholly defeated. Rather, individual tenants often exhibited defeat and resistance simultaneously.