Dr Craig French University of Nottingham

Event details

From Dominance to Diversity: A New Case for Mental Health Pluralism

In this talk, I will develop a new argument for mental health pluralism. This is the view that there isn't just one concept of mental health that expresses a single phenomenon. Rather, there are many different concepts of mental health, and mental health is many different things: that is, having good mental health or being mentally healthy can be fundamentally different across different cases.

The argument will focus particularly on mental health care. I will discuss dominant medical forms of mental health care. I will then discuss forms of mental health care that deliberately resist medical forms, focusing specifically on a community-based mental health care service of which I am a part: the Middle Street Resource Centre (MSRC).

The argument I will develop is that in the MSRC there is a movement from dominance to a form of diversity that is suggestive of mental health pluralism. In particular, the MSRC resists medical forms of mental health care in part through conceptual diversification: specifically, the creation of non-medical or medical-critical conceptions of mental health in addition to medical conceptions. I will argue that this movement from dominance to diversity is best understood in the framework of mental health pluralism.