Traditional healthcare narratives have set the stage for the care of the population with Severe Mental Illness (P-SMI). Thus far, two prevailing health strategies anchor services for mental illnesses, acute psychiatric care, and mental health, psychosocial rehabilitation. Between these, care transitions mediate PSMI’s needs and their movements from the hospital to the community and home. However, as individuals with Severe Mental Illness (i-SMI’s) leave the hospital, time is short with little opportunity to make known authentic narratives born out of self-evidence. After transitional care, maintenance treatment re-centers these individuals back into a playbook with operatives of pathology and disability and inconsistencies with the narratives on recovery and rehabilitation.

This project sought to hear i-SMI’s stories and propose how their experience can be used to create a new “counter” story of transition that empowers these individuals through a better understanding of their “space”: conceptualized here, as all that surrounds them and is dynamic and responsive to their interactions and needs. Underpinning this inquiry is a post-modernist conversation that converges on the critical perspectives in the theory of architecture, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the aesthetic practice of psychiatric nursing in the context of transitional care. A qualitative paradigm of narrative repair guides an ethical appraisal, “deprivation of opportunity,” and “infiltrated consciousness,” regarding relational power dynamics that are at work in healthcare master narratives.

Narrative findings of this study reveal that identity and agency come together in a personal space of safety born out of a core sense of self, belonging, and control. Space emerges within the self-narrative as physical sensibilities in the constructs of agency and safety, and as with emotional responses, metaphor and meaning can repair personal transitions.

The counterstory derived from the narrative findings reveals: Equitable relational dynamics attune social space, the physical environment, and meaning, as a response to the dismissiveness and overcontrolling health professional power. Thus, the journey toward narrative repair from the perspective of i-SMI’s uncovers a deeper counternarrative, Ecosystem of Space: the manifestation of a personal architecture for healing, making a systematic organic-space-experience for the core sense of self to transition and flourish.

During the 1960s, American youth were coming of age in a post–war period marked by an unprecedented availability of both money and leisure time. These conditions afforded young people new opportunities for exploring fresh ways of thinking and living, beyond the traditional norms of their parents' generation. Tom Wolfe recognized that a revolution was taking place, in terms of manners and morals, spearheaded by this latest generation. He built a career for himself reporting on the diverse groups that were developing on the periphery of the mainstream society and the various ways they were creating social spaces, what he termed “statuspheres,” for themselves, in which to live by their own terms. Using the techniques of the New Journalism—“immersion” reporting that incorporated literary devices traditionally reserved for writers of fiction—Wolfe crafted creative non–fiction pieces that attempted not only to offer a glimpse into the lives of these fringe groups, but also to place the reader within their subjective experiences. This thesis positions Wolfe as a sort of liminal trickster figure, who is able to bridge the gap between disparate worlds, both physical and figurative. Analyzing several of Wolfe's works from the time period, it works to demonstrate the almost magical way in which Wolfe infiltrates various radical, counterculture and otherwise “fringe” groups, while borrowing freely from elements across lines of literary genre, in order to make his subjects' experiences come alive on the page. This work attempts to shed light on his special ability to occupy multiple spaces and perspectives simultaneously, to offer the reader a multidimensional look into the lives of cultural outsiders and the impact that they had and continue to have on the overarching discussion of the American Experience. Ultimately, this paper argues that by exposing these various outlying facets of American culture to the mainstream readership, Wolfe acts as a catalyst to reincorporate these fringe elements within the larger conversation of what it means to be American, thereby spurring a greater cultural awareness and an expansion of the collective American consciousness.