“Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know”: the pervasive socio-medical and spatial coding of mental health day centres

In a research area typically dominated by the biomedical field, this paper seeks to explore the emotional experiences of long-term, mental health service users who attend charitable day centres. Academic literature has predominantly focussed on a macro-analysis of the social, political and geographical position of those with mental health distress. Subsequently, service users have been positioned as a largely homogenous group who mainly reside on the boundaries of social integration due to the negative social representations of mental health impairment. These postulations can advocate a romanticised notion of how service users engage in consensual and non-judgemental social norms in terms of social inclusion of those within therapeutic spaces. Thus, indicating that a high level of mutual camaraderie exists within a day centre. However, this approach can negate the realities encountered by service users on a daily basis whereby differing medical ascriptions such as ‘depression’ and ‘schizophrenia’ can not only influence a service user’s own self-identity and behaviour but ultimately, the acceptance of other members. In conclusion, this work indicates that rather than a discrete linear position between the ‘otherness’ of mental health distress and ‘normative’ human geographies, this area remains a complex phenomenon with levels of diversity when linked to diagnostic criteria.