Abstract
Narratives of self‐responsibility are pervasive in neoliberally oriented contexts, and have been found to engender feelings of shame and failure amongst those affected by poverty. Here, we use findings from research in two low‐income communities in south‐west England to examine how these narratives become embodied within people's daily lives when they intersect with systems of welfare support and the current political drive to upscale treatment for common mental health conditions. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, we examine how narratives of self‐responsibility and associated welfare reform strategies impact on the mental health of people living in economic hardship. The data show how such narratives inflict, sustain and exacerbate mental distress and suffering, and how they become naturalised and normalised by individuals themselves. We demonstrate how this situation pushes people to seek support from General Practitioners, and how clinical interactions can normalise, and in turn, medicalise, poverty‐related distress. Whilst some people actively resist dominant narratives around self‐responsibility, we argue that this is insufficient under broader sociocultural and political circumstances, to free themselves from the harms perpetuated by symbolic violence.
Highlights
Poor, ‘working class’ neighbourhoods and the people within them have long been the subject of public scrutiny, judgement and media scorn
Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, we examine the ways that narratives of self-responsibility and associated welfare reform strategies impact on the mental health of people living in economic hardship
The study aimed to gain insight into the ways that narratives of self-responsibility were taken up and embodied – or alternatively, resisted – within economically disadvantaged communities; the ways these narratives and associated welfare reforms impacted on mental distress; and the way these narratives interconnected with the medicalisation and pathologisation of poverty-related distress
Summary
Poor, ‘working class’ neighbourhoods and the people within them have long been the subject of public scrutiny, judgement and media scorn. The narratives that are used to demean the poor are formidable, and have been deployed across recent decades by a series of governments in the UK from across the political spectrum; from notions of an ‘underclass’ during the Thatcher era, to the language of ‘exclusion’ during the Blair era, and more recently under the coalition and current Conservative government, to adages relating to a ‘broken’ and ‘lost’ country that requires punitive changes to welfare to restore economic order (McKenzie 2015) Underpinning all such rhetoric has been what Lawler (2005) describes as a ‘narrative of lack’, in which (usually white) working class people are seen by others (middle classes, politicians, media) to lack material resources, but to be deficient in ‘taste’, knowledge, and what Bourdieu (2010) refers to as the ‘right’ ways of ‘being and doing’. We show how this situation pushes people to seek support from General Practitioners (GPs), and how clinical interactions themselves can normalise, and in turn, medicalise, what are inherently social and structural issues of poverty
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