Home and mental ill-health: twenty dimensions

Abstract

In the context of psychiatric rehabilitation and care, home is often associated with health. In the context of deinstitutionalization, however, home has increasingly become the primary site of psychiatric suffering. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic research project with a drama group for young adult mental healthcare service users living in supported housing facilities, this paper presents twenty dimensions of home through which mental ill-health can be approached as a bodily experienced, and discursively and medically structured form of being in the world. These dimensions are here offered as a framework for further exploration of the social, spatial, temporal, structural and embodied aspects of psychiatric suffering.