Engaging with communities and precarity theory to bring new perspectives to public mental health

ABSTRACT

In this paper we explore the role of precarity theory in bringing new perspectives to public mental health. The paper draws on a qualitative, participatory research study carried out in Glasgow that illuminates the entangled and complex relations between the social, bio-political, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions that produce mental health and ill health. Through the accounts of Sassy Queen, Tony, Simba, John, and Rhianna, we explore the attrition of everyday lives that are lived in constant states of crisis, the forms of precarity that it precipitates, and how this plays out for them concerning how they talk about and experience ‘mental health’. Their experience provides an alternative vantage point to understanding mental distress to those which are made possible through recourse to prevalent social determinant and behavioural models of public health. The paper concludes that the operations of the political as everyday biopolitics must become more visible within public health, and this requires interdisciplinary and narrative approaches to fully understand the border zone between macro-level politics and the biopolitics of everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity theory
• qualitative
• participatory
• biopolitics
• public mental health

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sassy Queen, Simba, John, Rhianna, and Tony, their fellow research participants, the community organisation and Glasgow Caledonian University students who contributed to this study. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers whose comments have supported the development of our thinking.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.