Diversity, complexity and ordinality: Mental health services outside the institutions—service users’ and professionals’ experience-based practices and knowledges, and new public management

Diversity, Complexity and Ordinality: Mental Health Services Outside the Institutions—Service Users’ and Professionals’ Experience-Based Practices and Knowledges, and New Public Management

In conjunction with the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, social workers have been commissioned to help service users in their daily living in their homes and in the community. The consequences of these changes for experience-based knowledge and practices in their contexts remain relatively unknown. In this study, eighteen service users and the social workers they described as helpful for them were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Thematic Analysis. The following themes emerged: “Here, there and everywhere”, “Doing, being, becoming”, “Talking” and “Order, planning and improvisation” concerning the contradictions service users and professionals m…