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ABSTRACT
“Citizenship” is a term from political theory. The term has moved from the relationship between the individual and the state toward addressing the position of ‘others’ in society. Here, I am concerned with people with long-term mental health problems. I explore the possibilities of ethnographically studying this rather more cultural understanding of citizenship with the use of the concept of relational citizenship, attending to people who leave Dutch institutions for mental health care. Relational citizenship assumes that people become citizens through interactions, whereby they create particular relations and social spaces. Rather than studying the citizen as a particular individual, citizenship becomes a matter of sociality. In this article, I consider what social spaces these relationships create and what values and mechanisms keep people together. I argue that the notion of neighborhood as a form of community, although built implicitly or explicitly into mental health care policy, is no longer the most plausible model to understand social spaces.
Notes
1. The term “relational citizenship” was coined in Pols (2006), but in this article it is developed methodologically.
2. The history in this article stops at the first decade of the twenty-first century, when Dutch de-institutionalization became solely an issue of costs and budget cuts, rather than citizenship (see Parr Citation2008 for explanations of the move to de-institutionalization). However, the issues of how to live together are still important for the success of ex-patients living outside institutions. Articulating these issues allows social scientists to keep a critical eye on developments, even if the language of citizenship is disappearing from policy texts.
3. http://cpr.bu.edu/resources/newsletter/assessing-developing-readiness-rehabilitation. Individual rehabilitation programs in the Netherlands were—and are—greatly influenced by the ‘Boston School’ or center for psychiatric rehabilitation, with William Anthony and Marianne Farkas as leading spokespersons. As in the Netherlands, the Boston School is today oriented more toward recovery than rehabilitation.
4. Ironically, this meant they had to cut the relationships they had, with carers and fellow patients, in order to establish new, ‘normal’ ones. See Pols (2009).
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Jeannette Pols
Jeannette Pols is professor of Social Theory, Humanism and Materialities at the Department of Anthropology, in the program ‘Health, Care and the Body,’ at the University of Amsterdam. The chair is installed by the Socrates Foundation. She works as associate professor and principal investigator in the section of Medical Ethics, Department of General Practice of the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam. Second affiliation: Department of Sociology, Anthropology, University of Amsterdam.