Biopower is a prominent force in mental health, with psychiatry having a strong influential grasp across the areas of definition of mental disorders, diagnosis, care, treatment, and legislation. One area that impacts upon the everyday lives of community mental health service users is treatment, largely dominated by medication. This paper will explore biopower in relation to the practices and management of mental health service users’ medication regimens. Michel Foucault’s insistence in his later work that power is the product of bodily (...) forces will be drawn upon in highlighting the importance of undertaking analysis of medication regimens. Taking examples from a project focused on service user experience, the concept of ‘somatic enactment’ is suggested as a means through which to open up biopower to the localised concerns of service users with regard to the issue of managing one’s body on a day to day basis, as affected by medication. In doing so, the author seeks to move towards a notion of biopower that does not only work on a ‘top down’ manner, and in which processes of embodied subjectification can be illuminated, without recourse to a straightforward power-resistance framework. (shrink)

The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of cities and countrysides. Not reducible to individual bodies or language, sense becomes (...) the primary mode of relationality through which experience is produced. Such insights are explored in light of contemporary concerns regarding the constitution of bodies and materiality, which emphasize notions of movement and process. The distinction Serres makes between sense and language is argued to be valuable in terms of theories of virtuality that frame material embodiment as ineffable and beyond language. The article concludes by suggesting that Serres can aid re-attunement to sense, although not in a generalistic fashion, but as part of disciplinary specific engagements. (shrink)

This paper develops an approach to analysing the importance of anticipations of the future on present actions in the lives of mental health service users, for whom sensing stability in the future is important as part of the recovery process. The work of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead is drawn upon to argue that temporality is understood spatially, and that past and future experience only exist in relation to their shaping of present activity. This process is produced spatially rather (...) than chronologically. Drawing on empirical work with community mental health service users the paper focuses on the home space as a key site for organising space in anticipation of future life. This involves analysing accounts of home making in which we see the role of anticipatory futures in the ordering of domestic space. The paper concludes by arguing that home spaces are a key site related to ongoing psychological well being, and that analysis of such spaces is important in terms of highlighting practices through which service users attempt to ‘make the future’. . (shrink)