Building a new community psychology of mental health : spaces, places, people and activities

This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health. Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: Conceptualising Mental Health in the Twenty-First Century....Pages 1-12 The Flawed Assumptions of Psychology and Psychiatry: A Martian Analysis....Pages 13-42 Social Approaches to Distress: From Enclosures to Fluid Spaces....Pages 43-66 ‘Bike Minded’—Normal Human Encounters (on Bikes)....Pages 67-82 Fishing and Youth Work, or ‘What Is It about Fishing that Makes Life Better’?....Pages 83-100 ‘Helping Them Hold Up Their World’—Parents of Children with Complex Needs and the Beneficent Organisation....Pages 101-117 I’m Singing in the Rain....Pages 119-133 ‘A Place to Be’—A Cut and Shut of the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project....Pages 135-153 The Joy of Sex....Pages 155-172 Some Possible Directions for the Future....Pages 173-188 Back Matter....Pages 189-199