ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together the interdisciplinary studies and methods to observe and think about human behaviours in their social contexts, so one can put mental health 'symptoms' into a bigger, or at least broader, contextual frame. It describes important contexts to guide the initial observations and analyses of human behaviour. The contexts are social contexts, cultural contexts, economic contexts, opportunity contexts and historical contexts. Any of those contexts could have changed from that traumatic event and given rise to the contemporary situation. A person keeps part of the context secret or hidden because of the social relationships or other contexts, and in many cases the sequences of social behaviour and the relationships work better if people do not know the external contexts that give rise to them. In analysing behaviour people must look to how some behaviours are supported or occasioned by special groups that have developed their own ways of doing things—the cultural context.
