The Moral Life of Doors in an Open Psychiatric Center

Doors are infamous in psychiatry for being used as instruments of constraint. Yet, while taking a close look at the doors of an open psychiatric center for teenagers in Brussels, I discover that doors play much more ambivalent roles beyond the issue of access and that their normativity shifts in the ongoing practice of care. While examining the moral life of these doors, I describe four modes of reflexivity that unfold with them. These reflexive modes are central to care work, since they put fraught issues on the table and enable a more livable everyday togetherness in institutional care.