Mental Distress

The empirical evidence associating people with mental distress and social injustice is unequivocal. This thesis offers a least reductive, structured qualitative exploration of how different social justice outcomes for people in this social group happen. To achieve this the study explores whether and how the capabilities approach can be applied to provide a normative means of explaining the social justice experiences of people with mental distress. It does this through conducting and analysing individual interviews with twenty-two people living in Glasgow who have recent in-patient experience of psychiatric hospital, sixteen participants being interviewed twice. The interviews are framed by combining concepts from the capabilities approach with relevant sociological literature, seeking to: understand the relationship between personal, social and structural factors affecting lived experiences; consider the character of social justice experienced and conceptualise this using concepts from the capabilities approach; take a critical realist approach to understanding how social justice experiences may be produced and reproduced; pursue these aims with regard to both values-based research principles from the survivor-influenced literature and participation principles from the capabilities approach.
By critically interpreting empirical data using capabilities concepts and sociological concepts, the analysis is able to combine what had been two separate fields of study (Holmwood, 2013) and provide an original interpretation of how social injustice tends to be reproduced. The substantive findings explain how different social justice outcomes for people with mental distress are shaped by living with mental distress, experiencing the psychiatric system, and living in society. Although participants tend to have characteristics of ‘surviving’, or living with ongoing social injustice, a minority have characteristics of thriving. Some participants within both characteristic groups also experience ‘being outside’ dominant social norms. Methodologically the study demonstrates that concepts central to capabilities such as Conversion Factors and the domains approach can be operationalised to explain social justice outcomes for this social group, adding to and critiquing these concepts in the process. Theoretically, the thesis proposes a nascent critical capabilities model of mental distress, reinforcing the compatibility between the capabilities approach and critical realism, so providing a further contribution to the sociology of mental distress.

The Anthropology of Mental Health Interest Group affirms that the state of mental health in Academic Anthropology needs serious attention and transformation. We respond to structural inequities in academia that exacerbate mental distress among graduate students and other anthropologists who experience oppression, by putting forward a policy statement with recommendations to create more equitable learning and working environments. [mental health, policy, system transformation, structural inequities, workplace]

In Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this paper we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that are designed to help people deal with mental distress. We will discuss the way that ‘bodies’ must tack between oft-competing pressures and draws, which emanate from the performance of sense that is contained within these sites. Attempts to ‘make’ sense of the body in such terrains often require an increasingly sophisticated set of skills and expertise and can, despite our best efforts, result in the body being transported to unexpected places. In order to capture a sense of movement, people must try to transform their offline experiences into a set of actions that can be rendered meaningful in terms of an online domain, which we argue is against the way that people sense. We develop a theory of sensory bodies as subject to continual ‘movement’, drawing on the work of Serres, Simondon and Manning, before discussing three examples of social media use in mental health, and the potential implications for people having to learn to sense in and through such online spaces.

Objective: The present study aimed at examining the effectiveness of mindfulness-based
cognitive therapy on psychological aspects of Quality of Life, depression, anxiety, and stress
in patients with multiple sclerosis.
Methods: This was a quasi-experimental research with pretest-posttest and control group
design. A total of 30 members of the MS Society of Semnan City, Iran, was selected by purposive
sampling in 2015 and were randomly divided into two groups, i.e. experimental (n=15) and
control (n=15) groups. The experimental group received mindfulness-based cognitive therapy
and the control group received no treatment. Before treatment and immediately after treatment,
the patients filled in Lovibond psychological distress scale and multiple sclerosis Quality of Life
questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance.
Results: The results showed a significant difference between the experimental and
control groups in terms of health distress, mental well-being, cognitive function, and
role limitations, but no significant difference was found between the two groups in
terms of overall Quality of Life. Also there is not any significant difference between the
experimental and control group in term of depression, anxiety and stress. Mindfulnessbased
cognitive therapy has a significant effect on psychological aspects of Quality of
Life, including health distress, mental well-being, role limitations due to emotional
problems, and cognitive performance (P<0.05). However, this effect was not statistically
significant on one of the psychological aspects of Quality of Life (overall Quality of Life),
depression, anxiety, and stress in patients with multiple sclerosis (P>0.05).
Conclusion: Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can improve the psychological Quality of
Life of patients with multiple sclerosis.

Role identity theory describes the purpose and meaning in life that comes, in part, from occupying social roles. While robustly linked to health and wellbeing, this may become unideal when an individual is unable to fulfill the perceived requirements of an especially salient role in the manner that they believe they should. Amid high rates of mental illness among public safety personnel, we interviewed a purposely selected sample of 21 paramedics from a single service in Ontario, Canada, to explore incongruence between an espoused and able-to-enact paramedic role identity. Situated in an interpretivist epistemology and using successive rounds of thematic analysis, we developed a framework for role identity dissonance wherein chronic, identity-relevant disruptive events cause emotional and psychological distress. While some participants were able to recalibrate their sense of self and understanding of the role, for others, this dissonance was irreconcilable, contributing to disabilit...

In what follows, I want to explore a holistic, rather than an atomistic approach to mental disturbances, an approach that places such disturbances out in the world of everyday life, rather than as a dysfunction solely within an individual. Thus, for the moment here, I want just to move around inside the world of human possibilities, and to explore a number of different examples of communication difficulties in which people experience, i.e., sense, a certain anxiety — to do with anticipating a damage to themselves caused by other people’s responses to them — that leads them, literally, to shy away from making the effort to communicate. For communicating with others is not done easily; it requires labour on our part to ‘shape’ our expressions to fit both our own needs, and the requirements of our circumstances. Indeed, opening our mouths to speak in public is not easy for any of us. How will we be judged; how will we be made to feel by how others respond (or not) to us? Our very being-in-the-world is at stake.

The empirical evidence associating people with mental distress and social injustice is unequivocal. This thesis offers a least reductive, structured qualitative exploration of how different social justice outcomes for people in this social group happen. To achieve this the study explores whether and how the capabilities approach can be applied to provide a normative means of explaining the social justice experiences of people with mental distress. It does this through conducting and analysing individual interviews with twenty-two people living in Glasgow who have recent in-patient experience of psychiatric hospital, sixteen participants being interviewed twice. The interviews are framed by combining concepts from the capabilities approach with relevant sociological literature, seeking to: understand the relationship between personal, social and structural factors affecting lived experiences; consider the character of social justice experienced and conceptualise this using concepts f...

This is the report of user-led research into people's strategies for living with mental distress, published in 2000. Funded by the National Lottery and carried out at the Mental Health Foundation, it was one of the first substantial user-led research projects in mental health in the UK.