What Does Mental Health Mean? An Ecocritical Conceptual Review of an Albertan Curricula
Abstract
What does mental health mean?— In a review undertaken to respond to this question for my doctoral research, I have found in common psychology, psychiatry, and public health, a focus of study for exploring the origins of conceptualizations given to mental health. Yet, curiously, inquiries that questioned curricular inheritances or the ideological foundations of mental health as a concept did not appear as persistently within curriculum studies, a discipline invested in understanding the influences of affective-social ecologies on knowledge construction. As an educator who has supported diverse urban public schools with mental health initiatives on Treaty 6 Territory, I found a lack of research on mental health in curriculum studies a troublesome condition. So, I delved deeper into a further review, using sources closer to home. This time, I would apply an ecocritical hermeneutic research approach. Soon, I would learn of a legacy founded through a mental hygiene movement entrenched in a settler-colonial worldview generating pioneering metaphors to elicit public support for eugenics as a project of re-place-ment. It seems that beliefs about mental health have been quite harmful here in Alberta when reinforced by governing ideological assumptions rooted within overt, subtle, and forgotten, expressions of meaning and acts to establish the normative.
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