Cris’s account renders the psychiatric ward as an environment where surveillance and atmosphere converge, not opposing forces but interlocking systems that shape perception, gesture, and relation. Risk, in their description, is both seen and felt: it is visible in observation windows, cameras, and staff movement, but it also saturates the air as a pervasive tension.
CRIS
on sky
“It was like my way out of that environment was to just stare at the sky.”
“There were moments where I just thought, like, it’s so beautiful, like the sky, but I guess it comes from a place of real sensory deprivation that I had, so that was really meaningful."
CRIS
on their clay objects
“I was also thinking about sort of like the natural sea urchins and stuff like that… some of those creatures, they’re very visually appealing but also kind of consume things or hurt things.”
Across participants’ accounts, the atmosphere of risk is described as something that circulates — a pressure that moves through air, sound, and environment as much as through policy. Descriptions of hyper-vigilant listening, of staying alert to distress in the corridor, and reflections on the way risk “informs everything about how the ward is run and managed,” evoke an environment that seeps inward. Anxiety and a sense of being on high alert becomes contagious, moving between staff and patients, producing what might be thought of as a shared internal weather. In this climate, to breathe is to participate: to inhale the ward’s tension, to absorb its rhythms of anticipation and restraint. Air itself becomes a regulatory medium, carrying the atmosphere of surveillance and fear through its circulation systems: a literal and figurative infrastructure of control. In the accounts of participants, the ward functions as a closed climate: one that sustains itself through the constant exchange of anxious air, a risk system that is breathed in and out, perpetually renewed by those living within it.
This porous, circulating air recalls Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of spheres as the immunological environments that sustain and regulate collective life. The psychiatric ward, in this sense, constitutes an artificial sphere, a microclimate sealed for safety yet thick with its own affective weather. For Sloterdijk, every social formation manufactures its own interior climate, an atmospheric infrastructure that maintains life by filtering what may enter and what must remain outside. He uses the term air conditioning not simply to describe a technical system but as a metaphor for the regulation of collective breathing; a way societies manage exposure, permeability, and immunity. The ward exemplifies this logic: its air circulation, observation routines, and protocols for movement all work to stabilise a fragile ecosystem of treatment and control. Yet, as Kate and Cris describe, this enclosed climate does not simply shelter; it pressurises. The same mechanisms that promise protection — the sealed windows, the controlled temperature, the constant supervision — also produce a dense atmosphere in which risk and safety circulate together, inseparable in the shared air.
Gernot Böhme’s writing on atmospheres as a “spatially extended feeling” (1993: 114) helps to clarify how this air becomes charged.
“Atmospheres are neither subjective impressions nor objective properties of things; they are something in-between, belonging to the sphere of coexistence between person and environment.” (2017: 2-3)
Atmosphere is felt rather than measured; it is sensed through the body before it is consciously recognised. Spaces and materials generate atmospheres through light, sound, texture, spatial proportion, and temperature. Architecture, design, and institutional routines therefore act as producers of atmospheres.
In this sense, the psychiatric ward can be understood as an atmospheric formation, where the textures of sound, light, and air — the repetition of alarms, pace of footsteps, and controlled ventilation — generate a spatially extended mood of risk.
Jane Bennett’s idea of vibrant matter further complicates this, inviting us to see air not as an inert background but as an active participant in the circulation of care and control. The breathing body and the institutional climate are inseparable: each shapes the other’s pressure.
Kate’s reflections extend this sense of atmospheric risk into the acoustic register of the ward. She describes the environment as “a shelter and a cocoon, but also a prison you're trapped in,” capturing how safety and suffocation coexist in the same spatial breath. The ward’s sonic landscape amplifies this ambivalence: the alarms, closing doors, and voices accumulate into what she calls “being almost completely enclosed in this highly oppressive, regimented, timetabled space.”
Surveillance is not a single act of looking but a vibration that moves through sound and expectation. Kate’s attention to noise, to the constant rhythm of staff movement and mechanical openings, turns risk into a kind of pressure system — a state of vigilance that gathers and releases around her body. She adapts through posture and stillness, curling into corners to lessen her exposure. In this way, Kate’s testimony shows that the ward’s risk atmosphere operates as a field of sonic humidity: thick with repetition, punctuated by alarms, shaping breath, gesture, and endurance.
KATE
on hyper vigilance
“The sounds of patients in distress… were very alarming and frightening to listen to. It was difficult because I also felt like I had an ambient feeling about whether or not I wanted to block the noise out… from a kind of hyper-vigilant feeling I also wanted to listen in case I needed to know what was happening.”
“If you yourself are in an environment where there’s a lot of unpredictable, slightly frightening things happening, I actually felt like it felt a bit more risky to block that out — it felt like the safe thing to do would be to be more aware, even though it was distressing.”
KATE
on acoustic density
“I think one of the things that you really notice about ward environments is how noisy they are and I found that really… I’m quite sensitive to sensory stimulation. So the sort of assault on the senses really stood out to me.”
“It’s not only that there’s lots of noises but you have so little control over those sounds and so little ability to block them out. So there’ll be staff pacing up and down the corridor… talking, jangling of keys… TV usually on in the lounge all day… or there’s a radio on in a room where no one was sitting… you’d have this kind of clashing noises.”
KATE
on risk atmospheres
“How do we bolster individual patient sense of safety rather than manage risk? You can feel it on the wards, you can sense the way in which it is informing everything about how the ward is run and managed, how the space is managed, how the environment is managed, how staff operate, the way patients are perceived”
“You feel over time that you're being perceived as, you know, where are you on the risk scale? Okay, well, you're quite high up on the risk scale so there's going to be a whole load of mitigations put in place to attempt to manage that. I mean, it literally will dictate whether you have freedom of movement, whether you get leave.”
FRAMING RISK
Risk is not an incidental concern but the principle that organises space, routines, objects, and relations. It orients how patients are seen, how they move, and how they are allowed to inhabit the clinic. In this chapter, I argue that risk functions as an orienting force: it materialises in the smallest gestures and textures of the clinic, shaping encounters before they occur.
I first situate risk within sociological and critical theory, drawing on Beck’s “risk society,” Rose’s “risk politics,” and Foucault’s account of disciplinary surveillance. I then examine how these theories are enacted in practice: through procedural choreographies (Ahmed’s “lines” meeting Goffman’s “total institution”) that script bodily movement, through classificatory systems of surveillance that determine patients’ freedoms, and through the everyday objects that condense risk management into material form. Together, these sections show how risk is embedded into the ward’s architecture and routines, yet also how it produces ambivalent effects—objects and practices that both constrain and, at times, are reoriented toward comfort or reprieve.
To situate participants’ clinical encounter with the ward, it is necessary first to consider how the concept of risk has been theorised within sociology and critical theory. Ulrich Beck’s influential notion of the risk society frames late modernity as increasingly organised not around wealth or production but around the management of potential harms. As Beck writes, “the logic of wealth is being replaced by the logic of risk” (Beck, 1992: 19). Risk here is anticipatory: it is less concerned with present conditions than with imagined futures, producing institutions oriented towards prediction and prevention. Psychiatric wards exemplify this anticipatory turn. They are less organised around responding to immediate needs than around avoiding possible harms, rendering the everyday environment a site of constant vigilance. Risk, as Deborah Lupton stresses, “is always about the future: it is a discourse of uncertainty and potentiality” (Lupton, 2013: 6). On the ward, this means that patients are governed not only by what they have done but by what they might do. This produces a form of institutional temporality that is projective rather than present, where patient experience is subordinated to surveillance and mitigation.
Nikolas Rose has made this connection explicit in relation to psychiatry. In Governing Risky Individuals (1998), he argues that the central problem of psychiatry is no longer “dangerousness” as an exceptional trait, but the ongoing assessment, prediction, and management of risk. Psychiatry, he suggests, now functions as a biopolitical apparatus for governing uncertainty, producing new classificatory practices and risk scales that determine patients’ freedoms and restrictions. Rose (2001: 2) later characterises this shift as the emergence of “risk politics,” in which the management of populations is carried out through technologies of prediction and control. Risk functions as a governmental logic: “risk is a way of ordering reality, of rendering it thinkable in such a way that it can be governed” (Rose, 2007: 6). Psychiatric wards, in this sense, are not merely spaces of treatment but laboratories of governance, where the management of “risky individuals” justifies and organises the entire institutional environment.