Placing precarity: access and belonging in the shifting landscape of UK mental health care

Abstract

This paper engages with the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK. I focus on moments of access and transition in a voluntary sector organisation in London: an intercultural psychotherapy centre, serving a range of im/migrant communities. Whilst both ‘belonging’ and ‘place’ are often invoked to imply stability, I explore how material contexts of access and inclusion can paradoxically be implicated in the ongoing production of precarity—of unstable, uncertain, and vulnerable ways of being. A sociomaterial analysis of ethnographic material and visual data from two creative mapping interviews attends to material and spatial aspects of the centre and its transitory place in the urban environment. It demonstrates how these aspects of place became entangled in client experiences of access: uncertainties of waiting, ambivalence towards belonging to a particular client group, and questions around deservingness of care. This engendered an embodied and situated experience of ‘precarious belonging’. I therefore argue that precarity should be ‘placed’, both within the concept of embodied belonging, and ethnographically, within the material constraints, impermanence, and spatial politics of projects to include the excluded in UK mental health care.

Refugee mental health and the role of place in the Global North countries: A scoping review

“…Most qualitative studies used interviews and focus groups ( n = 9). Some used approaches such as: sensory ethnography with refugees involved in gardening activities ( Biglin, 2020 ), creative mapping and interviews ( Brenman, 2020 ; Sampson and Gifford, 2010 ), participatory research, workshops and interviews (ASPIRE) ( Murray et al, 2019 ), and ethnographic fieldwork ( Grønseth, 2001 ).…”

“…Table 4 shows characteristics primarily, but not exclusively, discussed in the referenced studies. Additionally, access to green spaces and outdoor physical activities ( Biglin, 2020 ); material and social aspects of institutions ( Brenman, 2020 ; Leiler et al, 2019 ; Zehetmair et al, 2021 ); built and natural environment, local history and culture ( El-Bialy and Mulay, 2015 ; Grønseth, 2001 ; Herslund and Paulgaard, 2021 ); and ethnic density ( Finnvoqld and Ugreninov, 2018 ) were included as important place characteristics relevant to refugee mental health.…”

Beyond the asylum

“…Nevertheless, within the field of mental health geography, rich contributions made by scholars such as Philo, Parr, Söderström and Duff challenge this narrative and, by adopting a qualitative approach, stress the heterogenous, relational, embodied and rarely predictable response of people (Curtis, 2010). This increased interest in individuals' lived experiences, combined with a socio‐material and relational understanding of place, has pushed geographical research towards a situated knowledge production centred on embodied and affective dimensions (Brenman, 2021; Crooks et al., 2018; Parr, 2000; Parr & Philo, 2003). Here the urgent need of putting the patient at the centre of the geographical debate emerges by way of questioning whether issues of suffering should be seen as a product of cultural violence and discrimination that leads to a dehumanisation of the mentally ill and their everyday struggles.…”

Reordering the machinery of participation with young people

“…With KCL's mission to ‘serve’ the local community, we must be careful not to impose the university's values onto these many spaces, as if they have not yet caught up yet with knowledge, tech, and the better worlds the university tries to impose (Massey, 2005 ). As Brenman ( 2021 ) argues, precarity is not inherent to any particular space. Instead, ‘precarity emerges from bodies and materials assembled in (or out of) place’ (Ibid.…”