Methodology and mental illness: resistance and restorying

• Published in: Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing 2014-04, Vol.21 (3), p.197-205
• Main Authors: Fisher, P., Freshwater, D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Humans; Mental Disorders - psychology; mental health; narrative; Narrative Therapy - standards; Nursing; Patient Participation - psychology; post-structuralism; Professional-Patient Relations; Social Identification; social justice; Social Justice - psychology
• ISSN: 1351-0126; 1365-2850
• DOI: 10.1111/jpm.12073

Accessible summary This paper compares two post‐modern methodological approaches, post‐structuralist and narrative, and considers their usefulness in relation to emancipatory research in mental health. The paper finds that post‐structural analyses can be useful in deconstructing oppressive practices and in indicating emerging forms of resistance. Narrative approaches potentially offer greater emancipatory scope than post‐structuralism as they enable people with mental health problems to restore their lives and enact their own subjective transformation. However, narrative templates may perpetuate injustice if they erase the complexity of people's stories. This raises ethical issues in relation to narrative interpretation. Concerns with social justice have been traditionally associated with a modernist concept of the individual whose actions express an underlying, essential and unified self. This paper compares the usefulness of two methodologies (post‐structuralist and narrative) that are based on a rejection of identity of a unified self and compares their usefulness in relation to the development of a social justice paradigm within mental health. It considers how professional forms of knowledge may be deconstructed by post‐structural analyses, arguing that these have also been used by service users to articulate more enabling discursive alternatives. The notion of agency is central to our understanding of social justice. We question the commonly held assumption that although post‐structuralism deconstructs power and challenges its legitimacy, it is nevertheless unsuited to facilitating the necessary agency to put forward viable alternatives. The second half of the paper considers how narrative research offers greater emancipatory potential by enabling the research subject to author their stories and thereby brings about their own subjective transformation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of people's stories by researchers may result in the imposition of narrative templates that erase complexities and contribute to the perpetuation of oppression. This raises ethical implications in relation to how people's stories are interpreted.