Chapter 20 Embodiment and space in understandings of suicide and self- harm

Abstract

This handbook critically examines spaces of mental health and wellbeing across multiple, often intersecting, domains from green and blue spaces to lived and embodied spaces, creative spaces, work and home spaces, and institutional and post-institutional spaces. The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing features 45 chapters from leading international scholars who collectively interrogate the spatial dimensions of mental health and wellbeing from conceptual and experiential viewpoints. The ways in which these theoretical developments prompt a re-thinking of mental health and wellbeing as concepts is also discussed before presenting some highlights from the handbook’s five main sections – (1) green and blue spaces, (2) lived and embodied spaces, (3) creative spaces, (4) work and home spaces, and (5) institutional and post-institutional spaces. The key benefits of this book include a great appreciation of the complex networks and assemblages of mental health and wellbeing, the value of a geographical/spatial approach to thinking about mental health, and the vast array of spaces and places that are implicated in human and posthuman notions of wellbeing. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities as well as researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing, health geography, social and cultural geography, anthropology, mental health social studies, cultural theory, and architecture.