New Kinds of (Ab)normal?: Public Pedagogies, Affect, and Youth Mental Health in the Digital Age

Abstract

Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public pedagogy-as knowledge practices and processes that are produced within and beyond formal spaces of learning. We explore the question of how new pedagogic modes of address are produced through digital technologies-social media, gamified therapies, e-mental health literacy, wearable technology-as they invite particular ways of knowing embodied distress as "mental illness or ill health." The rapid growth of formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental health raises questions about the affective arrangements that produce new kinds of (ab)normal in the digital era. Through a posthumanist perspective that connects critical mental health studies and public pedagogy, this paper offers an original contribution that theorises pedagogic sites within the cultural formation of public-personal knowledge about mental (ill) health.

Re-Thinking Ethics and Politics in Suicide Prevention: Bringing Narrative Ideas into Dialogue with Critical Suicide Studies

“…This typically involves referring suicidal people to mental health services, where they will typically encounter practices of assessment, surveillance and risk management, which may not always be experienced as helpful. For example, a recent qualitative study demonstrated that suicidal persons who access psychotherapy often conceal their suicidality for fear of being involuntarily hospitalized [31]. This is an important finding as it shows how standard suicide prevention practices (i.e., risk assessment, surveillance, monitoring, involuntary hospitalization), can potentially jeopardize the cultivation of trust and may interfere with an honest and open dialogue, which are the foundations upon which any therapeutic relationship rests [32].…”

Rethinking women's experiences of depression and recovery as emplacement: Spatiality, care and gender relations in rural Australia

“…Emplacement moves our thinking beyond humanist models of subjectivity and agency that privilege coherence and inner meaning to consider how the depressedrecovering self is shaped by more-than-human relations that are material and discursive, spatial and temporal (Pyyhtinen, 2016). From this perspective experiences of embodied distress and wellbeing are not bounded, distinctly human phenomena, rather the recovering self is shaped through multiple relations; human and non-human nature (animals, forests, parks), digital technologies (medication, Apps) and material practices within the networks of social life (leisure, paid and unpaid work, unemployment, education and volunteering as dwelling and moving practices) (Cromby, 2011;Laws, 2009;Pink, 2011;Fullagar et al, 2017). This more-than-human approach also connects with literature on therapeutic landscapes that pays attention to the affective qualities afforded by certain place relations as "healing' and "comforting" (Laws, 2009(Laws, , p. 1828.…”

Writing Recovery from Depression Through a Creative Research Assemblage: Mindshackles, Digital Mental Health, and a Feminist Politics of Self-Care

“…The question of how mental health issues are culturally imagined, felt and represented becomes increasingly important for challenging the individualisation of responsibility for prevention and recovery. In relation to the digital assemblage of recovery stories, Mindshackles invites a different kind of affective engagement that differs from the pedagogical intention of many mental health sites to improve literacy (Fullagar, Rich and Francombe-Webb, 2017). Yet, the sharing of personal stories via digital media is not simply a 'better' alternative for learning about recovery.…”

“…therapies (Mood Gym) (seeFullagar, Rich & Francombe-Webb, 2017;Rich & Miah, 2017). While they may involve play like forms of engagement (seeSwist and Collin's chapter in this collection), there is a distinct lack of critical content or context when it comes to making visible the micropolitics of personal distress, especially as they are connected with inequalities related to gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.…”