Mental Health And Social Space - Towards Inclusionary Geographies?

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.


* 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

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.

List of figures.

Series editors' preface.

Preface and acknowledgements.

1 Geographies of difference: understanding mental (ill) health and social space.

2 Placing mental health: community, inclusion and citizenship.

3 Cultural landscapes: rural communities and mental health.

4 Therapeutic natures? urban gardening, citizenship and social inclusion.

5 Artistic spaces: the arts and mental health.

6 Virtual communities: the Internet and on-line geographies of self-help.

Conclusion: innovative geographies of mental health.

References.

Index.