Crises of commitment: ethics of intimacy, kin, and confinement in global psychiatry.

This article addresses the challenges inherent to framing an ethical language around the issue of patient "abandonment" in psychiatric hospitals. It describes the situations of divorced women in a north Indian private clinic to ask how a Foucaultian understanding of "the family" as a site of discipline, and the ethical languages that emerge from this critique, cannot account for the complexities of kin life in these women's lives and the multiple legal domains that shape them as subjects.