The struggle for the social: rejecting a false separation in our engagement with 'social' worlds in mental health spaces

Abstract

Abstract How are we to best conceptualise the social in relation to mental health? This piece seeks to explore a series of tensions that emerge in our attempt to contemplate, engage with, and address the social in mental health spaces. First, I explore the tensions created by disciplinary demands for specialisation, questioning the value of this in with regards to treating the social and emotional body, which continually rejects this fragmentation. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Deleuze, I re-interpret a case study of a woman seeking mental health services in South Africa, initially encountered during my doctoral research in 2010. In doing so, I also explore the tension created by seeking to hold the complexity brought to systems and researchers by everyday people, within spaces for response and action. To move the field forward, I explore the need for, and simultaneous impossibility of a ‘unifying theory’ which contains the multiple ways that the social manifests. In developing these arguments, I reflect on what possibilities for a unified perspective of the ‘social’ provided by phenomenology embedded in Black Sociological scholarship, which reminds us that our understandings and ways of being in the world are situated within and against the life world. This approach more readily offers access to the full range of the ‘social’ that we often seek to differentiate for the purposes of analysis or manageable systems of response. Though what this means for global mental health approaches is arguably still to be determined, I conclude with a potential call to action that asks us to develop maps of the social, which allow academics, activists, and practitioners to better engage in processes to recognise the constellation of social dynamics at work in people’s lives.