New Kinds of (Ab)normal?: Public Pedagogies, Affect, and Youth Mental Health in the Digital Age

Simone Fullagar, Emma Rich and Jessica Francombe-Webb
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Simone Fullagar: Department for Health, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Emma Rich: Department for Health, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Jessica Francombe-Webb: Department for Health, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

Social Sciences, 2017, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: Academic, policy, and public concerns are intensifying around how to respond to increasing mental health problems amongst young people in OECD countries such as the UK and Australia. In this paper we make the case that public knowledge about mental health promotion, help-seeking, support and recovery can be understood as an enactment of public pedagogy—as knowledge practices and processes that are produced within and beyond formal spaces of learning. We explore the question of how new pedagogic modes of address are produced through digital technologies—social media, gamified therapies, e-mental health literacy, wearable technology—as they invite particular ways of knowing embodied distress as “mental illness or ill health.” The rapid growth of formal and informal pedagogical sites for learning about youth mental health raises questions about the affective arrangements that produce new kinds of (ab)normal in the digital era. Through a posthumanist perspective that connects critical mental health studies and public pedagogy, this paper offers an original contribution that theorises pedagogic sites within the cultural formation of public-personal knowledge about mental (ill) health.

Keywords: public pedagogy; youth mental health; affect; digital technology; social media; posthumanist; mental health literacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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