ABSTRACT
This chapter broadens discussion on mental health service users and providers through presenting stories from within mental health settings that consider how service users and providers responded following the Sierra Leone in Sierra Leone. The discussion considers how the interaction between dominant social narratives and individual meaning-making influenced the trajectory of stories people were able to tell and therefore their relative experiences of distress. The aim of this research study was to explore how social context influences personal response following trauma. This research highlighted two main dominant discourses as the primary cultural resources which framed and constrained the stories of personal and collective responses told within interview. These ideas are further discussed in, where the impact of political and societal inequality upon distress, what people call mental illness, is considered by exploring the influence of power in relation to the biomedical model and Global Mental Health Agenda (GMHA).
