Events

CHD Colloquium - Neil Gong, Assistant Professor, Sociology, UC San Diego

Title: “Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles”

Abstract: This talk compares public safety net and elite private psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles to show how inequality shapes the very meanings of mental illness, recovery, client choice, and personhood. In Downtown LA, the crises of homelessness and criminalization mean public providers define recovery as getting a client housed, not in jail, and not triggering emergency calls. Given insufficient treatment capacity, providers eschew discipline for a “tolerant containment” model that accepts medication refusal and drug use so long as deviant behavior remains indoors. For elite private providers serving wealthy families, on the other hand, recovery means normalization and generating a respectable identity. Far from accepting madness and addiction, providers use a “concerted constraint” model to therapeutically discipline wayward adult children. Turning theoretical expectation on its head, the ethnography shows how “freedom” becomes an inferior good and disciplinary power a form of privilege.

Bio: Neil Gong is assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego. He uses diverse empirical cases to study power and social control in modernity, with a particular focus on understanding American liberalism and libertarianism. To this end, he has investigated civil liberties dilemmas in psychiatric care and the maintenance of social order in a “no rules” fight club. He is author of Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics (UChicago 2024) and co-editor (with Corey Abramson) of Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography (Oxford University Press 2020). Neil’s public writings appear in such venues as the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.