Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies? (RGS-IBG Book) - Hardcover

Parr, Hester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405168935 ISBN 13: 9781405168939

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Synopsis

Through a series of case studies this book brings to the fore the voices, lives, and capacities of people with mental health problems as well as the difficulties they face. It effectively demonstrates the ways people with mental health problems are active in re-scripting versions of social recovery through their use of very different community spaces.

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• Offers a 'hopeful epistemology' not typically found in mental health-related research
  
• Interrogates neo-liberal dogma that defines people with mental health problems as active social citizens wholly responsible for their own recoveries and acceptance
  
• Brings to the fore the voices of, lives, capacities and difficulties facing people with mental health problems
  
• Imaginatively differentiates rural, urban, interest and technological communities, disrupting familiar and conventional accounts of social inclusion and 'the local'
  
• Demonstrates how people with mental health problems are active in re-scripting their own social recoveries through their use and understanding of different social spaces

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In the nineteenth century, 'the mad' were segregated in special asylum spaces; in the later twentieth century, these spaces were dismantled and patients discharged into the community. Now, in the twenty-first century, ‘community care’ is still in vogue, but what has happened to the people with mental health problems? Stories of neglect, ghettoization, homicide, and reinstitutionalization regularly litter the pages of newspapers and academic journals. Is this the whole story? Are those with severe and enduring mental health problems still living on the edges of society?

This book illuminates the complicated reality of people living with mental health problems. It focuses on their voices, relationships, and achievements through case studies tracing innovative examples of community activity that are creating versions of social tolerance, social recovery, and peer and self-help for this consistently marginalized group. People with mental health problems are active in rescripting their own social recoveries, using different community spaces to create pathways to psychological and social stability.

About the Author:

Hester Parr is Reader in Human Geography at the University of Dundee. She has worked on questions of mental health for over ten years, publishing in a range of journals, including Society and Space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Area, Health and Place and Social and Cultural Geography.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1405168935
• ISBN 13: 9781405168939
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 211