Search

Focusing on the configuration of the relationship between fate and freedom of action, this article analyses recent self-help literature and online communities, particularly the genre that centres on the concept of resilience. The selected works and websites all address readers who suffer from depression, anxiety and stress. The article focuses on how the relationship between fate and freedom is represented in three literary figures: the reader, who is promised recovery; the narrator, who promises to save the reader from the mental illnesses; and the plot that the reader forms by his or her personal thoughts, feelings and experiences. Furthermore, fate and freedom will be analysed in a series of allegories and metaphors. We argue that each literary figure reflects a radical understanding of individual autonomy, that is, freedom of action. However, we also argue that each literary figure has a shadowy disadvantage, which activates a tragic reversal of fate. The article analyses how this self-help genre reflects a notion of tragedy in relation to mental suffering.

Healing architecture is a defining feature of contemporary hospital design in many parts of the world, with psychiatric in‐patient facilities in Denmark at the forefront of this innovation. The approach rests on the contention that designed clinical spaces and the particular dispositions they express may promote patient recovery. Although the idea that health may be spatially mediated is well‐established, the means of this mediation are far from settled. This article contributes to this debate by analysing medical encounters in the context of a new purpose‐built psychiatric hospital opened in Slagelse, Denmark in late 2015 as an example of healing architecture for the region. Grounded in qualitative research conducted in two wards between 2016 and 2017, we explore the key material and social effects of the hospital's healing architecture, and the spaces and practices it enacts. Following the work of Michael Lynch, we consider both the designed ‘spatial order’ of the in‐patient wards and the ‘spatial orderings’ unfolding therein with a particular interest in how order is accomplished in psychiatric work. With much of the existing discussion of healing architectures focusing on their impacts on patient wellbeing, we consider how healing architectures may also be transforming psychiatric work.

The Danes, in general, seem extremely averse to innovation, and if happiness only consist in opinion, they are the happiest people in the world; for I never saw any so well satisfied with their own situation. Yet the climate appears to be very disagreeable, the weather being dry and sultry, or moist and cold; the atmosphere never having that sharp, bracing purity, which in Norway prepares you to brave its rigours.

HAPPINESS ON EARLY RETIREMENT: THE WELFARE STATE AND AFFECTIVE MOBILITY IN JENS BLENDSTRUP’S GUD TALER UD | The article takes its point of departure in current happiness studies and probes the possibly fruitful interdisciplinary relation between research in social science that suggests close links between the Nordic welfare model and the high levels of selfreported happiness we find in the region, and literary criticism which instinctively seems to hold that unhappiness is most conducive to inspire the literary mind. To demonstrate that things are never as simple as that, the article reads Jens Blendstrup’s novel, Gud taler ud (2004), as an example of both a welfare narrative and of what it coins ”an affective mobility story”: a story about a person’s enhanced feeling of happiness in retirement. On the one hand, the novel portrays a person who finds happiness when he is granted early retirement from the welfare state. On the other hand, the novel relates this in such a manner that we are reminded that one man’s happiness may be another’s unhappiness.

At rummet har betydning, er langt fra en ny indsigt i psykiatrien, men det er nyt, at rummet sættes så direkte i forbindelse med en behandlingsmæssig tankegang, som det sker i forestillingen om helende arkitektur. Helende arkitektur er et centralt arkitekto-nisk princip i nyere hospitalsbyggeri, hvor recovery som behandlingsprincip ses ind-skrevet i de psykiatriske facilitetersammen med det arkitektoniske principom helende arkitektur.I denne artikel undersøges mødet mellem recovery og helende arkitektur med udgangspunkti et nyt psykiatrisygehus i Slagelse.På baggrund af et kvalitativt materia-le bestående af observationsstudier, interviews og dokumenter undersøges,hvordan hospitalsbyggeriet forventes at udgøre en behandlingsmæssig komponent. Artiklen viser med udgangspunkt i den tyske filosof Peter Sloterdijk, hvordan recovery-tankegangen ekspliciteresi de tre designprincipperhelende arkitektur, hierarki og transparens, somblev udviklet af arkitekterne under designet af psykiatrisygehuset. Der argumenteresfor,at detre princippertilsammen udgør en rummets grammatik, somudtrykker en sær-lig atmosfærisk politiki tilgangen til behandling af psykisk sygdom., That spaces matter in psychiatric treatment is far from a novel insight in the field of psychiatry, but novelty can be found in the ways that space is directly related to a particular approach to treatment, as is the case with ’healing architecture’. Healing architecture is a key architectural principle in newer hospital facilities, where the notion of recovery has been written into these newer psychiatric facilities together with the architectural principle of healing architecture. This article examines the juxtaposition of recovery with healing architecture in a newly built psychiatric hospital in Slagelse, Denmark. Based on qualitative material consisting of observations, interviews and documents, the manner in which the hospital building itself is expected to be an important component in the provision of mental health is explored. Based on the work of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk the article shows how the notion of recovery is explicated through three design principles developed by the architects during the design of the psychiatric hospital in Slagelse. The principles are: healing architecture, hierarchy and transparency. It is argued that the three principles together constitute a spatial grammar, which expresses a particular atmospheric politics in the approach to the treatment of mental illness.