Edge Entanglements with Mental Health Allyship, Research, and Practice

Book excerpt: Edge Entanglements traverses the borderlands of the community "mental health" sector by "plugging in" to concepts offered by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari along with work from Mad Studies, postcolonial, and feminist scholars. Barlott and Setchell demonstrate what postqualitative inquiry can do, surfacing the transformative potential of freely-given relationships between psychiatrised people and allies in the community. Thinking with theory, the authors map the composition and generative processes of freely-given, ally relationships. Edge Entanglements surfaces how such relationships can unsettle constraints of the mental health sector and produce creative possibilities for psychiatrised people. Affectionately creating harmonies between theory and empirical "data," the authors sketch ally relationships in ways that move. Allyship is enacted through micropolitical processes of becoming-complicit: ongoing movement towards taking on the struggle of another as your own. Barlott and Setchell’s work offers both conceptual and practical insights into postqualitative experimentation, relationship-oriented mental health practice, and citizen activism that unsettles disciplinary boundaries. Ongoing, disruptive movements on the margins of the mental health sector – such as freely-given relationships – offer opportunities to be otherwise. Edge Entanglements is for people whose lives and practices are precariously interconnected with the mental health sector and are interested in doing things differently. This book is likely to be useful for novice and established (applied) new material and/or posthumanist scholars interested in postqualitative, theory-driven research; health practitioners seeking alternative or radical approaches to their work; and people interested in citizen advocacy, activism, and community organising in/out of the mental health sector.