Meeting places in Norwegian community mental health care: A participatory and community psychological inquiry

• Main Author: Haugen, Lill Susann Ynnesdal
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English

This Ph.D.-dissertation revolves around meeting places in community mental health care. Norwegian meeting places often entail local easy-access daytime services that offer people who have experienced psychosocial hardships conversations with peers and staff, activities, and affordable meals. Over 50 years after the commencement of deinstitutionalisation, people who have faced psychosocial hardships are still considered amongst the most excluded groups across western societies. In Norway, meeting places became amongst the prioritised services to counter social exclusion and isolation from the early 2000s following the National Action Plan for Mental Health. However, in England, also during the early 2000s, meeting places were conversely beginning to be contested for being implicated in excluding service users from civil society. The contestation aligns with a broader questioning of the field of community mental health care that seems to have become more pronounced over the 2000s. The two aims for the dissertation and the overall participatory inquiry was: (1) to illuminate and explore meeting places from a community psychological perspective and (2) to produce practically relevant knowledge and to stimulate processes that may benefit people who use or may use meeting places. The theoretical lenses guiding the inquiry were a critical community psychology tradition, an emancipatory participatory research tradition, and Foucauldian discourse analysis in psychology. The dissertation explicitly intended to engage in moral and socio-political analysis and discussions, in relation to not only meaning, but also the material world, in line with Parker’s (2014/1992, p.1) discourse dynamics, critical community psychology, emancipatory participatory research, and as underlined by the practice-oriented aims. Resonating with the general focus of our team on the interests of people in psychosocial hardships, two discourse-analytical questions have guided the inquiry: (i) how do central contemporary discourses intertwined with Norwegian meeting places appear? and (ii) the positioning of service users: which consequences do the discourses appear to bring for service users in meeting places, including possibilities and restrictions? The following three more specific research questions have guided the empirical focus related to the three articles (every question was intended to subsume all elements of both questions above): (1) how do meeting-place employees discuss their enc