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Abstract
This paper engages with the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK. I focus on moments of access and transition in a voluntary sector organisation in London: an intercultural psychotherapy centre, serving a range of im/migrant communities. Whilst both ‘belonging’ and ‘place’ are often invoked to imply stability, I explore how material contexts of access and inclusion can paradoxically be implicated in the ongoing production of precarity—of unstable, uncertain, and vulnerable ways of being. A sociomaterial analysis of ethnographic material and visual data from two creative mapping interviews attends to material and spatial aspects of the centre and its transitory place in the urban environment. It demonstrates how these aspects of place became entangled in client experiences of access: uncertainties of waiting, ambivalence towards belonging to a particular client group, and questions around deservingness of care. This engendered an embodied and situated experience of ‘precarious belonging’. I therefore argue that precarity should be ‘placed’, both within the concept of embodied belonging, and ethnographically, within the material constraints, impermanence, and spatial politics of projects to include the excluded in UK mental health care.
Highlights
This paper engages with the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK
I argue that precarity should be ‘placed’, both within the concept of embodied belonging, and ethnographically, within the material constraints, impermanence, and spatial politics of projects to include the excluded in UK mental health care
The clinic-in-transition I describe in this scene is a voluntary sector mental health service in London, which serves a range of minority ethnic and im/migrant1 communities in its provision of intercultural, multi-lingual psychotherapy
Summary
This paper engages with the notion of ‘embodied belonging’ through an ethnography of the social and material aspects of accessing mental health care in the UK. The therapists have been saying for years that the windowless rooms are unacceptable for the kind of work that they do in the centre: it is not unusual for their clients to have been through incarceration, interrogation, or even torture This was shaping much of the decision-making about the building work that was needed to convert a new place in a neighbouring area from an office space to a therapy centre. This paper attends to such coexisting practices of inclusion and exclusion but focusses on inclusion beyond legal status, looking to the ‘‘micro dimensions of therapeutic geographies’’ (Parkinson and Behrouzan 2015:326) This is significant in an era of austerity and increasing decentralisation of mental health care from the state to voluntary services in the UK. Foregrounding the sociomaterial aspects of belonging, or ‘being in place’ in mental health care (Pols 2016; Ootes et al 2013a, b), I ask: how do places of care participate in, act on and enact belonging or non-belonging within voluntary sector mental health care?
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