Geopsychiatry from below: Exploratory review and preliminary analysis

Cheryl McGeachan and Chris Philo

International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2025, vol. 71, issue 5, 820-834

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: geopsychiatry; ‘the geo’; place and space; voices of experience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socpsy:v:71:y:2025:i:5:p:820-834

DOI: 10.1177/00207640251317017

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