ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of language and culture in our understanding of normality and abnormality, and uses deconstructive arguments to shift focus from psychopathology to discursive constructions that can be analysed in the qualitative research tradition. When we approach the concept of ‘mental health’ there is, of course, always a question about what this ‘mental health’ is that we intend to examine. These two words ‘mental health’ might, we think, be preferable to the couplet ‘mental illness’; but, tempted as we might be to find some neutral terminology to approach this crucial research question, we know as qualitative researchers that every word we use is rich with meanings that will always locate words in discourses we may not want to endorse.
Contemporary discourse is replete with words and images that locate the causes for our activities inside individual minds; we increasingly inhabit a ‘psychological culture’ that delimits the horizons of our inquiry, and so the construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of those horizons of what is thinkable are what I am concerned with in this chapter. Here I illustrate my argument with examples designed to evoke what we might call ‘mental health’ as a cultural practice. That means being specific about the cultural examples, and I will show how this cultural specificity also bears upon the kinds of methodology we use to study mental health.
I take my examples from Finland – with a specific focus on the city of Tampere – and Finnish culture, which does abound with certain specific images of ‘mental health’, and I will make clear 43that my exploration of cultural images is conducted from the standpoint of someone working in Manchester – a peculiar post-industrial twin for Tampere. In this way we will produce some new reference points for deconstructing images of mental distress.
