Abstract
This thesis is a qualitative field study carried out within psychosocial rehabilitation in municipal housing. Our focus in this thesis is professionals working in psychosocial rehabilitation in municipal housing, with residents that suffer from severe psychosocial dysfunctionalities. We are interested in identifying professionals’ experiences in the field of tension between the right to self-determination of residents living in municipal housing and the professionals’ duty of care.
This thesis examines the following question:
How do professionals in psychosocial rehabilitation experience the field of tension between the residents’ right to self-determination and the professionals’ duty of care?
The collection of data is phenomenological, carried out in semi-structured interviews inspired by narrative theory - to gain insight into the internal meanings regarding the professionals’ experiences. We have collected as well as constructed the narratives in short narratives of cooperation, from which we aim to analyze and present the reader of these experiences. We have found the theoretical basis of this thesis in the concepts of Bourdieu. Using these concepts, we combine social theory and data from semi-structured interviews - thus, we attempt to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experiences of the professionals. Our goal is to identify difficulties and to understand the subject/professionals within objective structures, in this case the professionals in an institutional and social context.
This is how we have provided insight in several relations in the experiences of the professionals. We divide these into three themes:
1. The relations: We have found that the professionals define that creating relations with the residents as the single most important element in their job.
2. The different interpretations: We have found discrepancy between informants’ interpretations of residents’ right to self-determination, their interpretations of professionals’ duty of care as well as when they find conditions are harmful to health. Thus, we have found several and conflicting views in the professionals’ experiences.
The experience of frustrations: The professionals’ experience is that they cannot fight the law or the system in order take to care of the residents unless the residents ask for support. Sometimes this engenders that residents with severe psychosocial dysfunctionalities live under inhumane conditions. We also found informants describing experiences of a conflicting field of tension between municipal psychosocial rehabilitation and the hospitalized psychiatry.

Across themes we have found in the short narratives of cooperation, that residents with no ability to make and maintain relations to professionals are in risk of suffering from professional neglect - which causes the professionals’ experiences of feeling powerless and frustrated - and leaves the residents to isolation and lives that take place in apartments under inhumane conditions.