Contracting Taskscapes: The Dissolution of Urban Mental Health Networks and the Effects on Clinical Response-ability

• In Event: Environ|Mental Urbanities: Problematizing ‘the Mental’ and ‘the Urban’ in Ethnographic Inquiry – I

Abstract

The transformation of urban environments alters the landscape of mental life; not just for service users and recipients, but for clinicians working to provide care under increasingly precarious conditions. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a community-based crisis intervention team in Berlin, this paper explores how financial trouble forced the spatial and temporal contraction of previously city-wide teams, undermining the capacity to maintain dialogically-attuned psychotherapeutic taskscapes (Ingold 1993). The reduced ability to make home visits, the negotiation of fewer working hours, the doubling up of teams in disappearing office space, and the loss of a city-wide network of services all forced practitioners to reconfigure how they interacted with service users and each other. Resentments, disagreements, feelings of clinical futility and frustration (Brodwin 2013) became anxious expressions of the real concern that they would be unable to provide the persistent attachment and attention that their understanding of “good care” demanded (Mol 2008). Under the weight of these changes, the care these clinicians valued in practice (Heuts & Mol 2007) became compressed; the aftershocks of contraction limiting their possibilities to sustain relationships with their clients and each other in response-able ways (Haraway 2008). In this case, taking stock of the conditions that shape environ|mental urbanities demands an attention not only to those on the receiving end of care services, but to the shifting taskscapes in which clinicians are working to provide them.

Author

• Lauren Cubellis, Freie Universität Berlin