Materialities in supported housing for people with mental health problems: a blurry picture of the tenants

You realise you are better when you want to live, want to go out, want to see people: Recovery as assemblage

BACKGROUND

The lack of social and material perspectives in descriptions of recovery processes is almost common in recovery research.

AIM

Consequently, we investigated recovery stories and how people with mental health and/or addiction challenges included social and material aspects in these stories.

METHOD

We conducted focus group and individual interviews. We investigated how the participants narrated their stories and how they assembled places and people in their recovery stories.

RESULTS

We found that narratives of recovery became assemblages where humans and their environments co-exist and are interdependent.

CONCLUSION

As such, narratives about recovery are about everyday assemblages of well-being into which stories of insecurity are interwoven, without a start or stop point.

Human-Animal Relationships in Supported Housing: Animal Atmospheres for Mental Health Recovery

Being in a relationship with an animal can promote the well-being of people. For many individuals, this usually takes place at home. This study reports about homes for people with mental health problems (with or without co-occurring substance use), who live in supported housing operated by public landlords, entailing tenancies that are usually stricter regarding their pet policies than ordinary homes. We thus addressed the following research questions through ethnographic fieldwork at seven distinct places: which types of human–animal relationships occur in supported housing, and how do they affect the tenants? We analyzed the collected data informed by the Grounded Theory approach and found three types of human–animal relationships within supported housing affecting the tenants differently, namely, “no animals,” “visiting animals,” and “shared/sole ownership of animals.” Animals in the buildings can stage atmospheres that promote solidarity and connectedness among people. In contrast, situations in which animals are forbidden can create emotional tensions between tenants and staff or landlords. When discussing fostering animal atmospheres and limits to keeping pets, we concluded that animals can contribute to the mental health recovery of tenants by creating acknowledgment and rootedness. Therefore, public housing services need to guarantee equal rights to the tenants as they do with every citizen, including the right to keep a pet.

When the wheels come off: Actor-network therapy for mental health recovery in the bicycle repair workshop

Professional accounts of emotional distress originate from within mainstream mental illness discourses and are underpinned by largely conjectural biomedical, brain-based conceptions of disorder. Alternative, formulation-based approaches remain delimited by cultural norms and linguistic resources. Service users frequently declare the most ordinary aspects of therapy the most helpful: listening, understanding, and respectfulness; these are not contingent upon the presence of a mental health professional. This paper describes ameliorations in states of emotional distress amongst volunteer trainee mechanics in a bicycle workshop, which has little overtly to do with mental health. Possible explanations for these ameliorations, or 'recoveries', are presented. In an enabling setting that offers the social and material resources conducive to particular ways of being, an applied actor-network approach is introduced as a practical way to disentangle the concomitant complexities of bicycles and everyday life. This approach to analysing states of distress-introduced here as 'actor-network therapy'-combines notions of enactment and enhandedness in the appreciation of 'engrenage' - the intriguing intricacy of locally generated, provisional realities.