“I feel like I’m useful. I’m not useless, you know?”: Exploring Volunteering as Resistance to Stigma for Men Who Experience Mental Illness

Abstract

Drawing upon findings from a psycho-social study employing biographical-narrative interviews, this article examines some challenges men unable to work due to mental illness face – such as intensified stigma – and how, despite this, they resiliently continue to seek belonging and purpose. This article offers some valuable insights into the instrumentalisation of volunteering for claimants of UK social security and how and why voluntary work is valued by those who autonomously perform it. It will explore how social connections provide a tool of resistance to help marginalised individuals legitimise their identity. It is argued participants’ engagement in socially valuable activities have become increasingly insecure due to continued conditional welfare reform and the detrimental impacts of austerity.

What Can Welfare Stigma Do?

“…Othering depends on the denigration of others between people who, in actuality, live in parallel circumstances (Chase and Walker, 2013). This latter point is also highlighted by Redman (2021), who draws on the notion of 'everyday resistance' to highlight the way in which unemployed male claimants in the UK use what are called 'everyday weapons' and covert struggles in their subversion of welfare conditionality and activation policies (see also Jordan, 2022). Such struggles however are a form of individualised self-help, rather than methods of system transformation.…”