Wellbeing as social care: On assemblages and the ‘commons’

Abstract

Time spent within either mental health inpatient units or residential substance use treatment services affects subjectivities and social relations in complex ways. This paper draws on recent currents in ‘assemblage thinking’, alongside Lauren Berlant's discussion of ‘the commons’, to explore these disruptions and propose new ways of thinking about the relations of support, wellbeing and care that may emerge within treatment. Care within these spaces can be understood as a sociotechnical assemblage – what Berlant calls a “patterning of social form” – that organises expressions of wellbeing in the promotion of distinctive modes of social wellbeing. These modes respond to infrastructural ‘glitches’ – breakdowns in social forms that typically accompany (if not directly cause) pathways into treatment – generating unique embodied expressions of social care, wellbeing, health and recovery. Drawing on qualitative data collected among individuals leaving mental health and/or substance use treatment settings in either Victoria or New South Wales, we argue that care may be understood by way of a series of social, affective and material techniques for restoring complex socio-material assemblages of care and recovery. This approach moves beyond the individual subject of health and illness to consider the wider repertoires of social, affective and material events, relations and practices that sustain wellbeing as a distinctive mode of social care, what Kim McLeod calls a ‘wellbeing machine’. This machine reimagines social care by way of pooled affective, material and embodied resources, and the ways that bodies draw upon these common resources in the restoration of assemblages of care and support. Revisioning care in this way offers new ways of thinking about the social, affective and material infrastructures needed to sustain wellbeing for individuals leaving treatment.