Ambivalent Activism: Re-contextualising mental health politics

This chapter outlines our motivations, justifications, and methods for promoting ambivalent mental health activism. We explore ambivalent activism as a potential antidote to the ‘politics of certainty’ which appears to underpin the acutely polarised debates characterising contemporary mental health politics, particularly when it comes to highly contentious issues, such as psychiatric diagnosis and medication. These polarised debates often de-contextualise mental health politics by disregarding situational nuances and oversimplifying complexities. We attempt to show how embracing ambivalence as a productive resource helps ensure that activism re-contextualises mental health politics and does justice to the complex, diverse and contested nature of mental health challenges and debates. Drawing on our discussion of the ethical, emotional and political benefits of ambivalence, as well as critical reflection on its pitfalls and on the emotional labour it involves, we sketch how we have been trying to offer a ‘third space’ for ambivalent mental health politics through our involvement in Asylum magazine. Asylum encourages the publication of concurrent, and even contradictory, positions in an attempt to transcend false dichotomies and oppositional dualisms, and subsequently subvert either/or ways of understanding mental health issues. A key message in this chapter concerns our belief that rather than ambivalent activism being an oxymoron, it could help make mental health activism more democratic and rooted in the needs of people with lived experience of madness and distress.