Rebuilding solidarity: an account of a men's health action project
✍ Scribed by Steve Melluish; Don Bulmer
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 97 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1052-9284
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The literature on men's health has tended to link men's psychological distress with the negative eects of male socialization and masculinity. This analysis ignores social class in¯uences on the experience and communication of distress, is at risk of misrepresenting the nature of working class men's experience, and may lead to practice that is oriented towards intrapsychic approaches or men's `inner worlds'. This paper reports on a grassroots mental health initiative called the Men's Advice Network set up in the west area of Nottingham, UK, for men experiencing psychological distress who have been unemployed for over one year. The project was based on ideas from Holland's work in London, which attempted to link psychotherapeutic work with social action. The project described here attempted to take account of working class experience by emphasizing the role of the group rather than the individual, the social as opposed to the intrapsychic aetiology of distress, and the role of action rather than introspection.