ABSTRACT
Anna Sexton, Stuart Baker-Brown, Peter Bullimore, Dolly Sen, and Andrew Voyce explore the role of archives and archival processes in giving voice to alternative identities and perspectives that seek to challenge the dominant medical model of mental illness and its associated psychiatric narrative. They present a case study of their co-construction of an archive of mental health recovery. By juxtaposing their five separate voices in the text, they offer a window into multiple, layered, and (at times) conflicting perspectives on the archive they created, placing particular emphasis on the concept of “recovery.” They provide a nuanced and critically reflexive perspective on the benefits and rewards embedded in the process and end product of their archive-creating while also surfacing its ambiguities and complexities. By providing a contextual backdrop to their archive of mental health recovery stories, they challenge the notion of the “psychiatric narrative,” and offer a counter-narrative to the dominant tropes of pathology and diagnosis characterising societal understandings of mental difference and distress. These discussions reinforce the complex inter-relationships between social justice, activism, archives, voice, and identity construction in the context of mental health.
