[mental health commons]
Mental health commoning is the work of actively weaving and sustaining communities of collaboration and action around the dimension of life that has to do with psychic suffering and fantasy. The commoners of the free clinics manufacture and use resources and goods by collectively creating the rules of production and use, improvising and revisiting these rules on an ongoing basis, in response to particular socio-ecological situations.
The free clinics prefigure new modes of self-governance grounded in the common participation of all people, horizontality, anti-hierarchy, pluralism and openness. This project proposes an ethnographic investigation of mental health commons ‘on the ground’, while also building a theoretical vocabulary for this kind of commons.
