Maddening Post-Qualitative Inquiry: An Exercise in Collective (Mad) Theorising.

Both post-qualitative inquiry and Mad methodologies sit on the fringes of qualitative health research, although their potential for creating new knowledges and practices is increasingly recognised. In this article, we explore the possibilities created by bringing these approaches together within research led by, or centring, mental health service users and survivors. We outline and reflect on a workshop undertaken with peer support workers to map affective intensities within mental health assemblages. We suggest the tensions between post-qualitative and Mad research approaches hold potential for mental health research, and qualitative health research more broadly, bringing together theory and the experiences of service users/survivors to think-feel-become otherwise in relation to health care, peer support, and activism.

Inclusion as Assimilation, Integration, or Co-optation? A Post-Structural Analysis of Inclusion as Produced Through Mental Health Research on Peer Support.

In the last 20 years, research on the inclusion of peer support within mental health settings has burgeoned, paralleling the broad adoption of service user inclusion within policy as a moral imperative and universally beneficial. Despite the seemingly progressive impetus behind inclusion, increasingly peer support workers talk of exhaustion working within mental health systems, the slow rate of change to oppressive values and practices, and ongoing experiences of workplace exclusion. Such experiences suggest differences in the way in which inclusion is produced across different stakeholder groups and contexts. In this article, we adopt Bacchi's 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach to identify how mental health research, often understood as an a-political activity, produces versions of inclusion. We argue current research predominantly produces inclusion as 'assimilation' and 'integration'. We use critical inclusion, mental health, and survivor scholarship to evaluate the effects these productions have for peer support and peer support workers, finding that both problematise peer support workers and those seeking support. We consider possibilities for more liberatory productions of inclusion, building on the notion of inclusion as 'co-optation'. Our analysis points to the need for researchers to engage with an uncomfortable reflexivity to enable more emancipatory possibilities regarding inclusion and peer support.