Irish Mental Health Social Movements: A Consideration of Movement Habitus

There has been a lack of any concerted mental health service users‘ movement within the Republic of Ireland. Mental health service users’ movements elsewhere have a marked orientation towards strategies of empowerment and the provision of peer advocacy and support for mental health service users. Two potential user habituses (drawn from the literature) are expounded and discussed, in a context of transformations they have effected in the mental health field. Through an analysis of Department of Health and Children literature and literature offered by mental health service user groups (such as Schizophrenia Ireland and AWARE) service user habitus in Ireland are delineated and explored. A comparison between the habitus drawn from international literature and the Irish literature illustrates that the dominant Irish mental health social movement habitus is a consumer habitus. This analysis demonstrates that Irish governmental psychiatric policy is driven by a consumer model that in turn is adopted by mental health social movement organisations, resulting in a dominant consumer habitus.