Hester Parr

University of Glasgow | UofG

Climate change is a major threat to global health. Its effects on physical health are increasingly recognised, but mental health impacts have received less attention. The mental health effects of climate change can be direct (resulting from personal exposure to acute and chronic climatic changes), indirect (via the impact on various socioeconomic,...

This paper addresses the relationship between light and mental health through a multifaceted inquiry into the complex and contested condition of ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’ (SAD). It does so by first charting a disciplinary neglect of seasonal depression in ‘geographies of mental health’, followed by a consideration of broader philosophical ideas...

Background This contribution responds to three articles (we refer to all three as ‘editorials’) concerning something called ‘geopsychiatry’. Aims To evaluate claims made in these editorials for ‘geopsychiatry’ as a new field of inquiry at the interface between geography and psychiatry. Method Close critical reading of two editorials in the Intern...

The rationale for this theme section on ‘COP26, human geography and earth futures’ is explained. A previous special issue of this journal – entitled ‘Climate change, COP26 and the crucible of crisis’, published during 2020 in anticipation of COP26 – is deployed to frame the specifically human-geographical concerns of the present theme section. Cont...

The American Psychological Association defines climate or eco-anxiety as a chronic fear of environmental doom (APA, 2017). This paper, instead, theorises climate anxiety as an emergent form of posthuman knowledge, albeit one that is dominated by vulnerability rather than affirmation. Put this way, the cultivation of ethical relationality holds pote...

This paper provides a commentary on the theme section entitled “Troubling Institutions at the Nexus of Care and Control.” Using the recent book Matters of Care (2017) by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa as a reference point, the authors of the commentary introduce the project of exploring how care and control admix across a range of institutional geograp...

This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse their management. By select...

An account is provided of a UK national seminar series on Arts, Health and Wellbeing funded by the Economic and Social Research Council during 2012–13. Four seminars were organised addressing current issues and challenges facing the field. Details of the programme and its outputs are available online. A central concern of the seminar programme was...

Police investigations of major crimes are typically conducted in contexts where there is contested or ambiguous knowledge about what occurred and such challenges are also routinely faced in the investigation of missing persons. This article examines ways in which attempts to ‘manufacture certainty’ in missing persons cases are strongly informed by...

Families of missing people are often understood as inhabiting a particular space of ambiguity, captured in the phrase ‘living in limbo’ (Holmes, 2008). To explore this uncertain ground, we interviewed 25 family members to consider how human absence is acted upon and not just felt within this space ‘in between’ grief and loss (Wayland, 2007). In the...

Based on novel research with families of missing persons, this article outlines important insights into the needs of families and the search related opportunities they present for targeted police investigative and search activities. The importance of empathetic and clear communication and liaison pathways between police and families are discussed a...

In this paper 'missing people' gain an unstable presence through their (restaged) testimonies recounting individual occupations of material urban public space during the lived practice of absence. We explore 'missing experience' with reference to homeless geographies, and as constituted by paradoxical spatialities in which people are both absent an...

As a contribution to both rural theory and a geography of rural disability, this paper tackles the idea of the 'rural panopticon'. Inspired by empirical research on mental ill-health in the Scottish Highlands, the authors specify certain workings of the rural panopticon, stressing interconnections between visibility, observation, surveillance, chat...

The scope and purpose of the medical humanities have been taking exciting new directions in recent years. The pedagogical roots of the field positioned medical humanities as supplementary to the scientific underpinnings of medicine in bringing humane judgement, insight and resource to the medical practitioner (see Brody 2009; McManus 1995). But new...

The paper contributes new ways of thinking about and responding to interview talk in the context of recent scholarship on interviewing, orality and witnessing. We proceed by paying attention to specific examples of interview talk on the experience of absence via the collecting of narratives from families of missing people. We highlight how ambiguou...

This paper argues that human geography has neglected the issue of ‘missing people’. Following an introduction, the paper uses four thematics, ‘mapping, searching, feeling and moving’, in order to explore a range of responses to missing absence and missing experience. It argues that attention to the voices of returned adult missing people would help...

Sophie's story' is a creative rendition of an interview narrative gathered in a research project on missing people. The paper explains why Sophie's story was written and details the wider intention to provide new narrative resources for police officer training, families of missing people and returned missing people. We contextualize this cultural i...

On the Geographies of Psychic LifePsycho-social GeographiesHow We Know Psychic LifePsychogeographies and the Psychodynamic CityDisruptive Psychic Life and Traumatic GeographiesConclusion References

IntroductionA brief spatial history of madness and mental illness I: The birth of the asylumA Brief Spatial History of madness and mental illness II: Community careUnderstanding the Geographies of Mad/Ill ‘Others’: Conceptual PerspectivesUnderstanding ‘incomplete’ asylums and patientsUnderstanding ‘differencing’ in Non-Institutional spacesUnderstan...

Through a series of case studies this book brings to the fore the voices, lives, and capacities of people with mental health problems as well as the difficulties they face. It effectively demonstrates the ways people with mental health problems are active in re-scripting versions of social recovery through their use of very different community spac...

Arts can make an important contribution to the social inclusion of marginalised groups such as those with mental health problems. In this article three different voices - those of the arts project user and artist, the project manager and artist, and the academic - explain from their varying perspectives what this contribution may be, and how it ope...

In this paper the powerful relations between mental health and nature are explored with reference to past asylum horticultural practices and to contemporary community gardening schemes for people with mental-health problems in the United Kingdom. Through the use of archival evidence, alongside contemporary voices of experience, understandings of th...

This paper explores how film-making can assist as part of the development of sensitive and participative methodologies appropriate to accessing the worlds of people with severe and enduring mental health problems. It discusses how the film-making process can also act as a text that holds valuable data about the impact of the arts on mental health,...

This paper explores how and whether people with severe and enduring mental health problems experience belonging through their participation in a range of contemporary artistic practices and spaces. The paper draws on qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with artists in two Scottish community arts-for-mental-health projects in order to show...

Training and Guidance (TAG) units in the Scottish Highlands are sites that people with mental health problems can access for training and learning activities designed to prepare them for (re-)entry into the labour market. These units also perform other, perhaps more intangible, roles in assisting trainees to cope with their mental health problems,...

Summary Covert ethnographic research materials are used to highlight different individuals’ embodied configurations of time and space (in this case people with mental health problems). Research relationships that revolve around body presentation and body movement are then examined. The problematic associations between covert ethnography and feminis...

This article explores the use of workfare as part of an optimal tax mix when labor supply responses are along the extensive margin. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between workfare and an earned income tax credit, two policies that are designed to provide additional incentives for individuals to enter the labor force. This article s...

A dominant urban focus in previous research on the social geographies of mental health has obscured the experiences of people with mental health problems living in rural localities. Critiquing this urban focus, we report on research conducted in the rural and remote Scottish Highlands. Evidence derived from in-depth interviews with over 100 users o...

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There is a small literature tackling migration and mental health, but less is said about the migration of people with mental health problems (incipient or diagnosed). The present paper considers what might be claimed about such migration, particularly when entailing movement into rural and remote areas where lack of anonymity, high social visibilit...

This paper contributes to an emerging geographical literature on the social geographies of caring. Drawing on recently undertaken empirical work in the Scottish Highlands, personal accounts about the provision of both formal and informal care for people with mental health problems are evaluated. The notion of ‘community care’ is critiqued, as too a...

In introducing this theme issue on 'Psychoanalytic geographies', we offer brief reflections on the discipline's 'psychoanalytic turn', raise certain issues regarding this turn that intrigue us, and ponder the limits on what psychoanalysis can bring to studies of social and cultural geography. In the process, we provide a thumbnail outline of the co...

This paper provides a geographical reading and critique of existing literature on rural mental health. It investigates what this literature has to say about how different dimensions of rural space—physical, demographic, economic, social and cultural—impact upon both the mental health of rural dwellers and the provision of mental health services to...

The paper explores a particular Scottish asylum geography (Craig Dunain Hospital near Inverness) as a meaningful social space. Drawing on archival evidence and combined with contemporary patient and staff voices, the contested meanings of this institution are discussed. In particular, patient narratives reveal both positive and negative assessments...

This paper deals with the rise of health and medical information on the Internet and considers the implications of this for a sociocultural geography of the body. The key purpose is to document how this information is communicated, consumed, and embodied, and also to evaluate how 'healthy' and 'ill' bodies constitute important geographies which are...

This paper critically evaluates, through use of covert ethnographic materials, an inner-city drop-in as a semi-institutional place where the identities of people with mental health problems are influenced by social processes of inclusion and exclusion. It is demonstrated, through an in-depth interpretative approach, that it is possible to understan...

In this paper I contribute to recent writings concerning geographies of health, geographies of the therapeutic, and geographies of the self. By paying attention to the 'delusional' experiences of people named as having mental health problems, the spatial implications of a disruptive mesh between consciousness and unconsciousness are investigated. T...

This paper argues that emerging 'post-medical geographies' require attention to the methodological in order to fully appreciate how different geographical knowledges are produced and contextualized within the politics of research relationships. 'Geographies of mental health and illness' are focused upon in order to argue that the 'peopling' of heal...

In recent revisionings of disablement and geography, conceptions of the body, of deviancy, and of the social construction of difference have been interrogated. The author argues that it is important not to neglect a critical geography of mental health in this broader rewriting of disability and ableism. Empirical examples are drawn from research in...

The book examines the changing geographies of mental health care in Nottingham from the beginning of asylum building to the most recent phase involving the closure of mental hospitals. Attention is given to general geographical changes in Nottingham, to underline the context for the evolution of mental health care. Also included is a consideration...