Fisher, P and Freshwater, D (2013) Methodology and Mental Illness: Resistance and Restorying. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. ISSN 1351-0126
Abstract
Concerns with social justice have been traditionally associated with a modernist concept of the individual whose actions express an underlying, essential and unified self. This paper compares the usefulness of two methodologies (post-structuralist and narrative) that are based on a rejection of identity of a unified self and compares their usefulness in relation to the development of a social justice paradigm within mental health. It considers how professional forms of knowledge may be deconstructed by post-structural analyses, arguing that these have also been used by service users to articulate more enabling discursive alternatives. The notion of agency is central to our understanding of social justice. We question the commonly held assumption that although post-structuralism deconstructs power and challenges its legitimacy, it is nevertheless unsuited to facilitating the necessary agency to put forward viable alternatives. The second half of the paper considers how narrative research offers greater emancipatory potential by enabling the research subject to author their stories and thereby brings about their own subjective transformation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of people’s stories by researchers may result in the imposition of narrative templates that erase complexities and contribute to the perpetuation of oppression. This raises ethical implications in relation to how people’s stories are interpreted.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2013 Fisher,P et al.; This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | discourse analysis; narrative; emancipatory research; social justice; mental health |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Healthcare (Leeds) > Nursing Mental Health (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Nov 2013 11:21 |
Last Modified: | 16 Jan 2018 21:25 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12073 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley Blackwell |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/jpm.12073 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:76825 |