Imagination: Collective Creative Responses to Psycho-patriarchal Oppression

This chapter explores the possibilities of arts-based, participatory action research processes to critique and re-shape dominant discourses relating to mental health, with a particular focus on the gendered dimensions of involuntary mental health treatment. Arts-based research practices enabled an engagement with affective, sensory, and kinaesthetic forms of expertise, which are often absent from mental health research, due to a preoccupation with text-based and ‘rational’ modes of knowledge production. Such processes facilitated a powerful critique of the policing and pathologisation of women’s experiences and emotions within coercive psychiatric settings, while making space for rich and nuanced findings about the possibilities of creative social action to challenge mainstream metal health assumptions and practices. Through disrupting power relations and status quo assumptions about mental health systems, a public exhibition led to public conversations about alternative understandings and responses, beyond biomedical and carceral logics. Examples of creative works produced within the study are incorporated into the chapter.