Mapping bipolar worlds: Lived geographies of ‘madness’ in autobiographical accounts

Geopsychiatry from below: Exploratory review and preliminary analysis

BACKGROUND

This contribution advances claims about 'geopsychiatry from below', attending to how 'voices' with lived experience of mental ill-health speak about 'the geo' or, more specifically, 'place and space'.

AIMS

To explore relevant interdisciplinary literature for academic research, scholarship and commentary containing voices of experience speaking about the geo.

METHODS

An 'indicative' and 'facilitative' review of relevant transdisciplinary literature in arts and humanities and social science, alongside an exploratory workshop where materials are analysed and relationships detected and, provisionally, mapped.

RESULTS

The literature review discloses no coherent body of studies into the geo from below, but rather a fragmented amalgam of materials-field observations, primary quotes and occasional elaborations-that are rarely the direct focus of inquiry (except in some contributions by academic geographers). Combining the literature review and the workshop analysis, an outline series of prompts are developed for relating 'Kinds of Places', their associated 'Affective Qualities' and actual spaces and places on the ground.

CONCLUSIONS

This study signals what a geopsychiatry from below might entail, providing important foundations for future transdisciplinary work on 'the geo' and mental (ill-)health.

Defining Urbanicity in the Context of Psychosis Research: A Qualitative Systematic Literature Review

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS

Numerous studies have found that being born or raised in urban environments increases the odds of developing psychosis in Northern and Western Europe. However, available research from Southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia has reported null results. A limitation in most studies to date is the inadequate characterization of urban and rural life components that may contribute to varying psychosis risk across regions.

STUDY DESIGN

To deepen our understanding of the different concepts and measures of urbanicity and related factors in psychosis research, we conducted a qualitative systematic literature review extracting information from studies published between 2000 and 2024.

STUDY RESULTS

Sixty-one articles met the inclusion and exclusion criteria and were used in the thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that urbanicity lacked a single, coherent definition across studies and regions. Three major categories of themes were developed from the analysis: (1) Urbanicity comprises several interconnected constructs, (2) Urbanicity measurements vary between countries from the Global North and the Global South, and (3) Urbanicity operates through key neighborhood-level mechanisms.

CONCLUSIONS

Future research on urbanicity and psychosis should consider the potential limitations of urbanicity's conceptualization and operationalization and aim to address these limitations by focusing on contextual, historical, and community-level factors, utilizing locally validated measures, and employing mixed-method designs.

Re-imagining world: From human health in the world to 'all-world health'

This article explores the concept of 'world' as it frequently appears across health studies; specifically largely humanistic and phenomenological variations in use of 'the world' and 'lifeworld' are considered as they have helped cast knowledge on health and care. Looking forward, it is argued that world might be reimagined post-humanistically and post-phenomenologically as a vital emergent material entity and property. This is a reimagination that pays dividends by drawing attention to all-world processes and productions, hence to 'all-world health'. On one level, all-world health involves consideration of the healths of all the world's material and biological entities (all parts of the world). On another level, all-world health involves understanding what an entity gains from its total surround as it moves through life (all parts of its world). Together these levels provide a more processual, relational and holistic understanding of health than that provided by traditional notions of human health states, determinants or meanings, and even by some environmental (ist) ideas on health. All-world health arguably provides a vision of interrelatedness on which greater unity, cooperation and care might be built.

Motivation, justification, normalization: talk strategies used by Canadian medical tourists regarding their choices to go abroad for hip and knee surgeries

Contributing to health geography scholarship on the topic, the objective of this paper is to reveal Canadian medical tourists' perspectives regarding their choices to seek knee replacement or hip replacement or resurfacing (KRHRR) at medical tourism facilities abroad rather than domestically. We address this objective by examining the 'talk strategies' used by these patients in discussing their choices and the ways in which such talk is co-constructed by others. Fourteen interviews were conducted with Canadians aged 42-77 who had gone abroad for KRHRR. Three types of talk strategies emerged through thematic analysis of their narratives: motivation, justification, and normalization talk. Motivation talk referenced participants' desires to maintain or resume physical activity, employment, and participation in daily life. Justification talk emerged when participants described how limitations in the domestic system drove them abroad. Finally, being a medical tourist was talked about as being normal on several bases. Among other findings, the use of these three talk strategies in patients' narratives surrounding medical tourism for KRHRR offers new insight into the language-health-place interconnection. Specifically, they reveal the complex ways in which medical tourists use talk strategies to assert the soundness of their choice to shift the site of their own medical care on a global scale while also anticipating, if not even guarding against, criticism of what ultimately is their own patient mobility. These talk strategies provide valuable insight into why international patients are opting to engage in the spatially explicit practice of medical tourism and who and what are informing their choices.