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This chapter considers what some have called the ‘inescapable anxieties’ (Rose et al. 2020) associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and we make two specific interventions: the first addresses contagious disease and places of care for people with mental health problems in historical and contemporary times, and the second explores psychological boundaries for those people who already experience severe anxiety conditions. Historically, occupants of ‘asylums’ were particularly at physical risk from the likes of cholera epidemics, but nothing was recognized about any additional burden upon their ‘madness’. During the current crisis, the physical dangers posed to psychiatric patients in closed-institutional environments (hospital wards) because of spatial proximities to bodies are paramount, but so too is a concern for the mental health of inpatients. The psychological effects of COVID-19 on those with existing mental ill-health outside of inpatient settings are also considered, particularly for those who already practice socio-spatial distancing, micro-boundary maintenance, and constant vigilance against perceived biohazards. We critically consider public commentary on these anxious pandemic geographies by both those with lived experience and those who staff psychiatric and psychological services.

We approach Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, as a site of pedagogy via foot, archival record, and film. We animate the mental health asylum as a contemporary space of learning and geohumanities education. We share elements of lectures, a field visit and workshops that bring undergraduate students up-close to asylum geographies past and present. We creatively render these materials on the page as means to explore educational and experimental encounters with shifting forms of medical intervention on the human mind-body.

No abstract available.

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 geographical notions of space and place. The article is structured around the key phases of police investigations, each of which involves the mobilization of different forms of geographical knowledge. In the first stage of ‘identifying and acquiring’ information, the process of search is structured by knowledge about the possible spatial behaviours of missing people often generated using spatial profiling techniques. In the second phase of ‘interpreting and understanding’, more nuanced accounts of what may have happened to a missing person are constructed as the police attempt to ‘place’ a person’s disappearance within a particular narrative based on their reading of the intelligence picture that emerges during the investigation. In the concluding phase of ‘ordering and representing’, the case to internal (senior police management) and external (relatives of the missing person and wider public) audiences investigators will often invoke a notion of ‘the end of the world’ referring not just to how they have defined the geographical limits of the police search if the person is still unaccounted for but also the boundaries of reputational risk and the proportionality of the police response.

In recent years, both within and beyond academic and clinical spheres, medical and health humanities have become increasingly influential. Drawing from interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, medical and health humanities present unique lenses for considering nuanced spaces and lived experiences of health and health care; they also help challenge traditional ways that medicine and health care are understood and practiced. This collection brings together practitioners and theorists working broadly in medical health humanities, asking them both to consider their work as temporally and spatially located and to position their practices in conversation with a growing uptake of humanities methods and methodologies in other disciplines. The work of nine contributors uses these themes as a starting point for thinking about the future of medical health humanities in new and potentially even more productive ways.

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 selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported and observed socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim's mobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder and danger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, as collected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence. We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy of continued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationships through regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores the relationships between gender and mobility.

This chapter discusses the implications and experiences of remote networks of support for and between people with phobias and anxieties. It utilizes to the specific healing potential inculcated in a particular context, in this case one enabled by print, telephone or internet. The National Phobics Society (NPS) serves a client group who experience extreme social and spatial exclusion as a result of debilitating anxiety disorders including phobias, and generalized and specific anxieties. The NPS operates from a base in the Zion Community Resource Centre, in the Hulme district of the city of Manchester in the North of England. The NPS receives an average of 50 calls per day to helplines staffed between 9am and 9pm by volunteer support workers. Telephone helpline services might be considered qualitatively similar in some ways to physically situated self-help groups in their intention to provide social and emotional support through contact with someone experiencing similar difficulties.

‘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 intervention with an argument about the transformative potential of writing trauma stories. It is suggested that trauma stories produce difficult and unknown affects, but ones that may provide new ways of talking about unspeakable events. Sophie’s story is thus presented as a hopeful cultural geography in process, and one that seeks to help rewrite existing social scripts about missing people.

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 to provide a foundation for creating a UK national network for researchers in the field to help promote evidence-based policy and practice. With funding from Lankelly Chase Foundation, and the support of the Royal Society for Public Health, a Special interest Group for Arts, Health and Wellbeing was launched in 2015.

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, chatter and interiorised senses of self-disciplining (particularly for those with fragile mental health). There are suggestions that Bentham regarded his institutional brain-child, the Panopticon, as most logically and properly an urban phenomena, even calling it ‘Panopticon Town’, but there is a supplementary argument that identifies a rural vision – of a virtuous, self-regulating farming community – present in the margins of his Panopticon thinking. Through the figure of the ‘glass palace’ in the countryside, emphasising the pervasive watching, judging and censuring of conduct, a further link is made from Bentham's Panopticon to the rural panopticon. The paper explores this link both textually and though the Highlands case study, concluding by examining Foucault's dual attention to both Bentham's Panopticon and a rural colony for delinquent boys, Mettray, as twin exemplars of ‘panopticism’ in the disciplining of troublesome and troubled populations (those with disabilities included).

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 paper, we represent families as active agents in spatial stories of ‘living in limbo’, and we provide insights into the diverse strategies of search/ing (technical, physical and emotional) in which they engage to locate either their missing member or news of them. Responses to absence are shown to be intimately bound up with unstable spatial knowledges of the missing person and emotional actions that are subject to change over time. We suggest that practices of search are not just locative actions, but act as transformative processes providing insights into how families inhabit emotional dynamism and transition in response to the on-going ‘missing situation’ and ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999, 2013).

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 operates. By enabling cultural citizenship, the arts provide a means for people who would otherwise remain on the margins of their communities to participate in public life and inhabit mainstream social spaces.

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 the therapeutic and social dimensions to nature work are outlined and deconstructed. It is argued that particular discourses concerning the powers of nature (work) in managing madness and mental-health problems are largely consistent across time and space (from the asylum to the community). However, in the contemporary era it is particular types of nature work that arguably contribute most directly to state agendas for social inclusion, and therefore to securing the place of people with mental-health problems in mainstream society. By briefly profiling the voices of staff and ‘volunteers’ from two urban garden schemes in England and Scotland, different experiences of garden work as ‘restorative’ and as ‘interventionist’ will be discussed. I conclude by evaluating how embodying and enacting gardening work act as a sustainable vehicle for new versions of social citizenship for people traditionally marginalised in mainstream society.

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, and facilitates a range of mutually beneficial outcomes for those collaborating across usual academic/community divides. This agenda contributes to a consideration of the role of the arts in participative social geographies of mental health, and critically expands recent discussions about uses of video and film in a visual discipline.

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 and present. We seek to understand such urban geographies of absence through diverse voices of missing people, who discuss their embodiment of unusual rhythmic occupations of the city. We conclude by considering how a new politics of missing people might take account of such voices in ways to think further about rights-to-be-absent in the city.

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 how such spaces engender geographies of creative recovery, social connectedness and cultural inclusivity. Set against a history of insane ‘outsider art’ and art therapy, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positions in relation to the supposedly inclusive cultural city are critically examined. Experiences of artistic belongings are shown as ones constituted by ambiguous and contingent social processes that only partially disrupt ascriptions of difference.

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, thereby offering a supportive setting with therapeutic dimensions (albeit one not explicitly configured as delivering therapy). In this paper we explore the ‘in-between’ quality of the TAG units as spaces that might be said to possess dual economic and social roles. Using primarily qualitative evidence, we investigate both sets of roles, debating the extent to which the economic and social imperatives complement or contradict one another. The paper contributes to critical commentary on how ‘workfare’ initiatives articulate with the experiences and concerns of disabled trainees, the novelty arising in part from centralising the material spaces at the heart of such initiatives.

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 of psychiatric services in the Highlands is deployed to investigate the complex socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion experienced by these users on a daily basis. A discussion of the explanations that usersthemselvesoffer of their experiences is accompanied by a theoretical framing of these issues pivoting on relations of proximity distance and intimacy repulsion.

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 are claims about how rural and remote rural locations engender particular configurations of caring roles, practices and relations. It is shown that geographical distance, social proximity, stoic cultures and rural gossip networks all have a part to play in how caring occurs in such places. The paper concludes by suggesting areas of future research.

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 contributions that follow.

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 rural populations. It is argued that there is much to be learned from the existing literature, although caution is expressed about slipping into stereotypical notions regarding the constitution of rural space. Questions are raised about a common tendency to lean upon more or less examined rural urban contrasts, although useful reflections can be found on the tangled representational politics of rural mental health embedded within differing characterisations of the countryside as opposed to the city

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 of internal and external asylum spaces. Changing feelings about the asylum are argued to be related to matters of geography, and are conceived in terms of distance from and proximity to the institution.

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 engagements with a range of critical, cultural and social theories have brought with them new encounters by scholars in the medical humanities with what may properly constitute the objects and categories of their enquiries.

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 negotiated and contested in virtual space. There are two clear foci in the paper. First, using Foucauldian understandings of medicalisation, the notion of a ‘fourth spatialisation’ of the medical gaze is evaluated in the context of the Internet as a new geography of health promotion which enables human subjects to ‘self-diagnose’ and to ‘discipline’ their bodies. Second, this argument is complicated by the use of empirical examples gathered from MS chat rooms, places in which communities of people gather to discuss and to contest medical knowledges which surround the ‘ill’ body. The paper concludes with speculation on research pathways for a ‘new medical geography’.

(2000). Disability, Geography and Ethics. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 98-102.

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. This empirical investigation explores individual accounts of delusional experience and the changed relationships with the body, home, and city. The ‘unboundedness’ of delusional experience is discussed, and the unpredictable therapeutic properties of nonmedical material spaces are addressed. It is argued that academic geography has neglected the voices of people who experience delusion and the many spaces which they inhabit.

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 health research should also be accompanied by debate about what sorts of methodologies we employ in accessing these minds/bodies and voices. The research interview is a primary focus here. A critique of psychoanalytic approaches to geographical research argues that such 'models' of interpretation and management can mean that participants or research 'subjects' can be framed in almost diagnostic categories of behaviour. Empirical examples of mental health research in Nottingham are used to argue that more flexible approaches which pay attention to perceived dualisms (such as 'sanity' and 'insanity'), negotiation, embodiment, socio-spatial contexts and content within the interview situation may aid in understanding the politics which encompass geographical health research.

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 feminist methodologies are also addressed.

In recent revisionings of disablement and geography, conceptions of the body, of devinney, 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 Nottingham, UK. These examples show how people with mental health problems access the public realm through individual (and often disruptive) use of urban spaces, possibly as strategies of resistance to imposed medical identities. In the second half of the paper the author documents a more collective political process occurring through ‘user movements’ which have facilitated patient power and patient influence in the places of therapy spread across the city.

Third, it is thus important to consider gender differences, as well as ethnic/racial differences, where the evidence supporting or contradicting polarisation is complex. One of the impacts of women's growing labour market participation, and of the loss of relatively well-paid manufacturing employment for men, has been the exacer bation of inequalities between individuals in waged employment. Large numbers of women have entered poorly paid occupations compared with a much smaller group of higher status women with professional qualifications who have captured well-paid positions. As a result, the proportion of workers in the lowest paid occupations has increased over the 1980s and 1990s. However, as I have argued elsewhere (McDowell 1991), drawing on aggregate data for England and Wales, the income distribution for women is becoming more unequal, paralleling that for men. A similar trend appears to be developing in France (Lipietz 1996) although great care needs to be exercised in cross-national comparisons as French women are far more likely to work in full-time employment than their English sisters. The impact of this ' stretching out ' of the female income distribution may reduce polarisation, as women in professional employment are generally less well remunerated than men in the same occupations. Finally, as Bruegel et al (1996) have argued, it is incorrect to compare occupational categories over time as if they are unchanging. Women's entry into professional and semi-professional occupations has had an adverse effect on the associated status and pay levels. Managerial positions in retail banks are a classic example (Kerfoot and Knights 1994). Thus the relationships between professionalisation, income distribution and polarisation are variable over time. I would be interested to see Clark and McNicholas's findings when they re-run their analyses taking gender differences, as well as race/ethnicity, into account.