From "bugging-out" to "chilling-out": manipulating emotion and evoking reason in a forensic psychiatric hospital.

Ethnographic research in a forensic psychiatric hospital demonstrates a prevalent ambiguity about the relationship between emotion and reason and a suspicion that many inmate-patients are not mentally ill. Nonetheless, central to the discourse and method of inmates and staff are skills in suppressing one's own emotions and in producing and manipulating others' emotions. Drawing upon Foucault's insights, the author suggests that practices in American penal and forensic psychiatric contexts shed light on the wider culture's surreptitious ideologies of emotion and interpersonal dynamics.