Rituals of Madness in the Practices of Place

While completing a PhD in literature with a focus on the practices of physical and linguistic spaces, I was also working and sleeping (on call) at a dilapidated house in a poorer part of Bristol in case I was needed by one of five paranoid or clinically psychotic residents. I gave out medication in the morning, then went home to study in a small rented room. I began to see ritual everywhere--in my professors' routines; my own habits; the behaviours of the mentally ill patients. This paper is the story of a number of madnesses and the problems with reading ritual performance in everything we do.