Introduction
Mindshackles volunteers are gay, straight and people who donât want to be labelled. We are entrepreneurs, unemployed and nine to fivers. One thing unites us, we have all had significant problems with our mental health during at least one point of our lives, or we care for somebody else who has, and we have made it through the other side. Some of us continue to experience ongoing mental health problems but each time we find a way to get out of bed and live another day. The majority of Mindshackles volunteers are people with a deep passion for something or someone and that aids our recovery. We want to tell our stories as part of our own journey to self-acceptance and ongoing recovery and to help others (and their loved ones) understand that they are not alone. Many of us have used our participation in the project to start conversations with our own families and friends about mental health. (Mindshackles, Volunteers1).
Trisha: âWhen I come off the dancefloor I think, ââThat was a good night, oooh I danced my socks off!â *laughs* Iâve cleared my mind, whatever problems I had before it doesnât seem to really bother me, once Iâve come off. I have to say, my mindâs blank, I donât think of anything. A lot of the musicâs from Brazil, Columbia, Italian, Portuguese, itâs a different language but music is universal. You donât have to be able to understand exactly what they are saying to be able to dance to the music. Iâm just on that dance floor and thatâs that. Iâm just listening to the music thinking, âOooh thatâs a lovely record,â *laughs* âOooh I like that record. Letâs find somebody to dance withââ. (Trisha:â Rhythm of joy, Mindshackles)
Trishaâs story on the Mindshackles website provides us with a unique point of departure for exploring how both leisure and digital practices can creatively transform public understanding about mental (ill) health and the possibilities of recovery. Our chapter is written through an academic-arts collaboration, or âcreative research assemblageâ (Fox & Alldred, 2016; Fox, 2015), to explore the dilemmas surrounding cultural representations of womenâs experiences of recovery from depression. We focus our discussion on the Mindshackles2 website that was developed by Iesha, to offer âpersonal stories about reclaiming life from mental ill healthâ. As a documentary photographer (and teacher, parent, youth advocate), Iesha created the site in 2013 as a means of using digital technology to share the experiences and voices of different people to publicly counter the stigmatisation surrounding mental health issues. The Mindshackles site and its associated Twitter handle offer an alternative, creative approach that seeks to capture and evoke everyday moments significant in the ongoing experience of recovery for different women (and also some men). It was Mindshacklesâ focus on everyday leisure practices in peopleâs recovery that began our conversations and connected our creative, personal, political, and academic interests. In our dialogue, we identified connections that emerged in our own distinct research and creative practices around different notions of recovery. Later in the chapter, we take up these threads of conversation as a means to collaboratively write through some of the digital dilemmas in producing creative-activist-academic knowledge. We focus largely on one personal story and photographâTrisha: rhythm of joyâfrom the Mindshackles site as an evocative example for our discussion.
In writing this chapter, we drew inspiration from the traditions of creative analytic practice (Sjollema & Yuen, 2017; Berbary, 2015; Parry & Johnson, 2007; Richardson, 2000), arts-based methods (Boydell et al., 2016), post-humanism (Fox, 2012, 2015; Duff & Sumartojo, 2017), and post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2014) to show how creative-activist-academic collaborations can generate different ways of âdoingâ both digital and gendered mental health. Simone approached the Mindshackles project with a feminist interest in the possibilities of creatively articulating a politics of self-care that invites different ways of engaging with personal stories as political and affective sites of social change (on the politics of self-care, see Fullagar, 2008b). Critical insights from feminist theories of embodiment, affect theory, and digital assemblages provide a way of exploring the micropolitics of leisure and well-being and troubling normalised biomedical perspectives on mental illness/health as an individualised issue. lesha was interested in alternative representations of mental health, where mental ill-health status was known and accepted but not actually the focus of the digital representations. The project gave the volunteers an opportunity to present a version of themselves beyond their mental health status that focused on experiences that provided them joy.
Creativity, Leisure, and Recovery: Digital Mental Health Practices
We draw upon Fox (2012, 2015) and Duff and Sumartojoâs (2017) notion of a creativity- assemblage to conceptualise Mindshackles as a digital project of cultural activism. We employ different representational practices to unsettle the binaries of real/representation, fact/fiction, digital/analogue, labour/leisure, and mind/body. In this way, we position the writing-reading of digital sites as practices of âcultural makingâ (Swist, Hodge, & Collin, 2016) that generate creative and critical forms of entanglement; as we write or read, we are also written through creativity as an embodied flow of affective meaning. Writing is not simply a rational, objective practice of producing knowledge that presumes to ârepresentâ a world that pre-exists it. Moving beyond a representational logic, writing-reading are understood as material practices through which a range of affects act upon us, as we write to affect others (pleasure, joy, sadness, anger, shame, etc.). In contrast to notions of creativity that privilege cognition, individual genius, or only specialised artistic practice, Fox (2015) argues more broadly that creativity is a profoundly affective aspect of everyday relations and embodied capacities that involve both human and non-human elements.
As a site for digital mental health promotion, Mindshackles produces an approach to recovery that emphasises the experience of creating-becoming that is oriented around diverse pleasures and leisure practices (as distinct from âexpertâ biomedical definitions of symptoms, diagnoses, or treatment protocols). âReaders/usersâ are engaged through affective and sensory relations that materialise through text and images. We can feel drawn to individual stories, compelled or repelled by certain images that move us (pleasurably, shamefully, empathically) as we connect, disconnect, react, or shun the everyday emotional lives of others that are grouped collectively (but not bound by diagnostic illness categories) around ârecoveryâ as a process of becoming. Digital re-presentations are thus read through the body, evoking memory, senses, and diverse affects that can produce new capacities, relations, and hence forms of agency. As Fox (2012, p. 499) states, âAffects are âbecomingsâ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 256) that represent a change of state of an entity and its capacities: this change may be physical, psychological, emotional, or socialâ.
The experience of contemporary subjectivity and common mental health issues is profoundly shaped by diverse assemblages that produce meaning across physical and digital space-time. The sense-making process of understanding distress is often mediated by digital practices, such as, searching Google in waiting rooms, Instagram images on the bus, writing-reading blogs on ...