Cheryl McGeachan writes: At the RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society- Institute of British Geographers) Conference that took place in Edinburgh last month, Dr. Geraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow) and I co-convened a wonderfully diverse set of sessions entitled ‘Securities and Insecurities: Experiences of Mental (Ill)Health”, the papers from which may be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the medical humanities:
- David Beckingham, Between inebriety and insanity: the treatment of drunkness in Scotland, 1879-1914
- Ebba Högström, Kaleidoscopic spaces: discursive and material spatial practices in Swedish decentralised mental health care
- Simon Moreton, (Re)drawing representations of mental health; comics, sequential art and graphic narratives
- Kim Ross, Landscapes of Care: How Glasgow negotiated the ‘Asylum Age’
- Michaela Edwards, Coping in the workplace: A geographical social construction?
- Candice Boyd, Melissa Thurley and Cameron Duff, On the role of enabling places in young people’s recovery from mental illness
- Heather Milne, “Safer walking” and access to the outdoor environment in dementia care: experiences of using GPS tracking technology
- Friederike Ziegler, “I’m not really depressed, am I?”: uncertainty in the interviewer-patient relationship in mental health research
Also on display at the conference were a considerable range of papers on ‘ontological insecurity’, with many using R.D. Laing’s work as a theoretical trigger for their own research discussions:
- Cheryl McGeachan, ‘The world is full of big bad wolves’: ‘policing’ sanity, madness and the family
- Liz Bondi, Insecure selves/feeling insecurities: exploring boundaries, spaces and liminalities psychoanalytically
- Louise Waite and Gill Valentine, Multiply vulnerable/precarious populations: creating a politics of compassion from the ‘capacity to hurt’
Full details of all the papers here can be found on the Conference webpage.