Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing

This handbook critically examines spaces of mental health and wellbeing across multiple, often intersecting, domains from green and blue spaces to lived and embodied spaces, creative spaces, work and home spaces, and institutional and post-institutional spaces.

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing features 45 chapters from leading international scholars who collectively interrogate the spatial dimensions of mental health and wellbeing from conceptual and experiential viewpoints. The ways in which these theoretical developments prompt a re-thinking of mental health and wellbeing as concepts is also discussed before presenting some highlights from the handbook’s five main sections – (1) green and blue spaces, (2) lived and embodied spaces, (3) creative spaces, (4) work and home spaces, and (5) institutional and post-institutional spaces. The key benefits of this book include a great appreciation of the complex networks and assemblages of mental health and wellbeing, the value of a geographical/spatial approach to thinking about mental health, and the vast array of spaces and places that are implicated in human and posthuman notions of wellbeing.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and the humanities as well as researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing, health geography, social and cultural geography, anthropology, mental health social studies, cultural theory, and architecture.

Chapter 20 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Candice P. Boyd is an artist-geographer and clinical psychologist. They are currently an honorary Principal Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne researching spaces of mental health and wellbeing, arts-based knowledge translation, and climate-related mental health issues. They are author of Exhibiting Creative Geographies (2023) and Non-Representational Geographies of Therapeutic Art Making (2017), co-author of Emotion and the Contemporary Museum (2020), and co-editor of Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts (2019).

Louise E. Boyle is a health geographer and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She completed an ESRC-funded PhD on The Social and Anticipatory Geographies of Social Anxiety Disorder (2019) and built on this research through an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (2020–2022). She is the author of Anxious Geographies: Worlds of Social Anxiety (Routledge, 2024).

Sarah L. Bell is a health geographer at the University of Exeter, whose work examines experiences of mental health, wellbeing, disability, and social inclusion in and with diverse forms of ‘nature’ – from parks, gardens, woodlands, coast, and countryside to the weather, seasons, and climate change (www.sensing-nature.com). Most recently, Sarah has been developing new collaborations to understand how the climate crisis – and prominent societal responses to it – is shaping the everyday lives and adaptive capacities of people with varied experiences and histories of disability (www.sensing-climate.com).

Ebba Högström is a professor in architecture at Umeå University. Her research interest is in social and experiential dimensions of architecture and the built environment. A specific interest is in geographies of welfare institutions and infrastructures of care. Currently, she is engaged in research projects addressing housing and living environments for vulnerable groups, i.e., people with mental ill-health and older people. Together with C Nord, she has edited the book Caring Architecture: Institutions and Relational Practices (2017).

Joshua Evans is an associate professor of human geography at the University of Alberta. He is a social geographer with interests in spaces of care, home, and work and their role in shaping the lived experiences of socially marginalized and vulnerable individuals, as well as spaces of policy development and implementation and their role in the creation of healthy, enabling, and equitable urban environments. His most recent research focuses on housing, homelessness, and urban justice.

Alak Paul is a health geographer at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. His research interest covers stigmatized diseases and public health. He focuses on everyday geographies of marginalized or vulnerable people in his research, especially how geographic space or place plays a role in reshaping the life of people or the environment. He is the author of HIV/AIDS in Bangladesh: Stigmatized People, Policy and Place (2020) and co-editor of Geography in Bangladesh: Concepts Methods and Applications (Routledge, 2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork (2023).

Ronan Foley is an associate professor in health geography and GIS at Maynooth University, Ireland, with expertise in therapeutic landscapes and geospatial planning within health and social care environments. His research focuses on relationships between water, health, and place, including two books and journal articles on holy wells, spas, social and cultural histories of swimming, and ‘blue space’. He is an Editorial Board member of Health & Place, was Editor of Irish Geography, 2015–2022 and chairs the MU Healthy Campus Steering Group. He collaborates on water/health projects with colleagues in Ireland, UK, Spain, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia.