Authority, dialogue and polyphony in psychiatric consultations: a Latvian case study.

This article explores the impact of economic liberalization on psychiatric theory and practice in Latvia. Through a close reading of four psychiatric consultations it examines the way in which contradictions between a market economy, its attendant philosophy of unlimited individual opportunity and the implementation of these ideas in the lives of individuals are negotiated by psychiatrists and their patients. It examines the uses of psychological and somatic vocabularies and questions their claimed connections to an enlarged sense of agency or its denial.