Jennie Gray

Living with a Label - an Action Oriented Feminist Inquiry into Women's Mental Health Jennie Gray

This research began in conversations I had with women, diagnosed with a mental illness, whilst employed as a social work practitioner at a women's health centre. The problematics of having been given a psychiatric classification prompted the phrase 'living with a label', which became the focus of our co-operative inquiry. Psychiatric diagnoses are determined and delivered through the discourses of biomedicine. The women I researched with, loosely connected as mental health service recipients, had often been positioned as 'subject' to an objective biomedical gaze. Through a process of exploration and discovery this project was designed to generate under­standings that could be useful to the women who participated. Not only is there a gap in the mental health knowledge continuum, but the need for such insights are made doubly pertinent at the beginning of the twenty first century as diagnostic trends suggest that morbidity rates will continue to increase. Our experience of researching together, and allowing the 'researched' room to know and act, produced possibilities, and also created conundrums, all of which were celebrated. This book will be particularly relevant for feminist researchers and mental health practitioners.