Learning community mental health compassion and understanding through theatre: a dramaturgy of ‘fragmentation’ symbolisms in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis

Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis presents a powerful account of mental illness (MI) that spotlights the intense struggles of the play’s protagonist. This work centres on examining mental illness via dramaturgical art, arguing for Kane’s portrayals of MI within 4.48 Psychosis as representing a radical—yet fitting—medium for encouraging societal analysis that shifts MI from an enduringly private sphere into the public, collective domain. 4.48 Psychosis (aka 4.48) as a performance is interrogated through a joint sociological-psychological lens: a Goffmanian analysis bolstered by a philosophical-informed approach. Three interlinked sociopsychology themes are revealed: Isolation, The End, and Distortion and Medicalisation. Employing Foucault’s theories on power, knowledge, and the medical gaze, findings elucidate how medicalised discourses (re)shape and control the experience and treatment of MI. Led by Research in Drama Education’s emphasis on learning through theatre as a socially and emotionally engaged process, practical implications for theatre-art as a critical medium facilitating wider societal recognition and detailed understandings of MI are put forward. And—these are validated through examination of existing community mental health engagement initiatives that have utilised 4.48. Subsequent implications for blended sociopsychology theory and interpretive analysis underpinned by transdisciplinary research approaches are spotlighted for their value in generating new avenues of mental health understandings for the psychology-psychiatry disciplines and beyond.