Temporalities of peer support: the role of digital platforms in the 'living presents' of mental ill-health.

This paper considers matters of time in online mental health peer support. Significant evidence of the value of peer support exists, with new digital platforms emerging as part of the digitisation of mental health support. This paper draws from a project exploring the impact of digital platforms on peer support through interviews with users of a major UK-based online peer support platform. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of the 'living present', the paper highlights how notions of past, present and future operate as co-existing dimensions of the present. The analysis highlights how the immediacy of digital platforms elicits expectations of peer support being 'on tap', which creates challenges when support is not received synchronously. Unlike in-person support, digital platforms facilitate the archiving of support, which can (re)enter the present at any moment through asynchronous communication. Anticipations of the future feature as dimensions of the present in terms of feelings regarding when support may no longer be needed. The paper offers potential implications for social scientific understanding of digital peer support, which include valuable insight for mental health services designing and delivering digital peer support.

"Recovery" in mental health services, now and then: A poststructuralist examination of the despotic State machine's effects.

Recovery is a model of care in (forensic) mental health settings across Western nations that aims to move past the paternalistic and punitive models of institutional care of the 20th century and toward more patient-centered approaches. But as we argue in this paper, the recovery-oriented services that evolved out of the early stages of this liberating movement signaled a shift in nursing practices that cannot be viewed only as improvements. In effect, as "recovery" nursing practices became more established, more codified, and more institutional(ized), a stasis developed. Recovery had been reterritorialized. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the threads of recovery, from its early days of antipsychiatry activism to its codification into mental health-including forensic mental health-institutions through the lens of poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. We believe that Deleuze and Guattari's scholarship provides the necessary, albeit uncomfortable, framework for this critical examination. From a conceptualization of recovery as an assemblage, we critically examine how we can go about creating something new, caught in a tension between stasis and change.

Toward an ontology of the mutant in the health sciences: Re/defining the person from Cronenberg's perspective.

Traditional health sciences (including nursing) paradigms, conceptual models, and theories have relied heavily upon notions of the 'person' or 'patient' that are deeply rooted in humanistic principles. Our intention here, as a collective academic assemblage, is to question taken-for-granted definitions and assumptions of the 'person' from a critical posthumanist perspective. To do so, the cinematic works of filmmaker David Cronenberg offer a radical perspective to revisit our understanding of the 'person' in nursing and beyond. Cronenberg's work explores bodily transformation and mutation, with the body as a fragile and malleable vessel. Cronenberg's work allows us to interrogate the body in all its complexity, contingency, and hybridity and provides avenues of rupture within current understandings of 'the person'. Reinventing the definition of what it means to be human, critical posthumanism offers opportunities to both critique humanist theories and build affirmative futurities. Also drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically, their concept of becoming, we propose a critical posthumanist alternative to the conceptualization of the person in the health sciences, that of the becoming-mutant, so frequently explored in Cronenberg's films. Such a conceptualization permits the inclusion of various technological interventions of the contemporary subject: The postperson. This position offers the health science disciplines a radical reconceptualization of the conceptual and theoretical approaches, extending beyond those trapped within the quagmire of humanistic principles.

Resenha do livro "Educação Física Menor" / Review of the book "Minor Physical Education" / Reseña del libro "Educación Física Menor"

O livro "Educação Física Menor" problematiza e propõe alternativas diante do chamado currículo cultural ou pós-crítico de Educação Física. Faz isso, a partir de dois gestos: problematizando algumas acepções culturalistas e almejando a singularização ou a minoração das perspectivas "maiores" do componente, a partir de uma conceitualização das filosofias de pensadores como Foucault, Deleuze e Guattari.

The book "Minor Physical Education" problematizes and proposes alternatives to the so-called cultural or post-critical curriculum of Physical Education. It does this from two gestures: problematizing some culturalist acceptations and aiming at the singularization or the minimization of the "major" perspectives of the component, from a conceptualization of the philosophies of thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari.

El libro "Educación Física Menor" problematiza y propone alternativas al llamado currículo cultural o postcrítico de la Educación Física. Lo hace a través de dos gestos: problematizando algunos conceptos culturalistas y apuntando a singularizar o disminuir las perspectivas "mayores" del componente, a partir de una conceptualización de las filosofías de pensadores como Foucault, Deleuze y Guattari.

Quality of life beyond measure: Advanced cancer patients, wellbeing and medicinal cannabis.

Experiences of advanced cancer are assembled and (re)positioned with reference to illness, symptoms and maintaining 'wellbeing'. Medical cannabis is situated at a borderline in this and the broader social domain: between stigmatised and normalised; recreational and pharmaceutical; between perception, experience, discourse and scientific proof of benefit. Yet, in the hyper-medicalised context of randomised clinical trials (RCTs), cancer, wellbeing and medical cannabis are narrowly assessed using individualistic numerical scores. This article attends to patients' perceptions and experiences at this borderline, presenting novel findings from a sociological sub-study embedded within RCTs focused on the use of medical cannabis for symptom relief in advanced cancer. Through a Deleuzo-Guattarian-informed framework, we highlight the fragmentation and reassembling of bodies and propose body-situated experiences of wellbeing in the realm of advanced cancer. Problematising 'biopsychosocial' approaches that centre an individualised disconnected patient body in understandings of wellbeing, experiences of cancer and potential treatments, our findings foreground relational affect and embodied experience, and the role of desire in understanding what wellbeing is and can be. This also underpins and enables exploration of the affective reassembling ascribed to medical cannabis, with particular focus on how it is positioned within RCTs.

The Dimensions of Desire Among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex With Men (gbMSM): An Evolutionary Concept Analysis.

Background and Purpose: Within nursing discourses, the concept of desire among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM) is not well understood. Among nurses, this concept is often constructed as being synonymous with sexual and other risk-taking behaviors, which can influence the type of care nurses provide to gbMSM and affect how this group engages with nurses - and their health. This misinterpretation of what desire represents has resulted in gbMSM becoming the target of public health campaigns and nursing interventions aimed at curbing their deviant behaviors. Such an approach by nurses, however, overlooks the meaning of desire among gbMSM. Methods: To enhance nursing knowledge about, and improve nursing practice for, gbMSM, a concept analysis of desire specific to this group was undertaken using Rodger's evolutionary model. For this analysis, 90 articles reviewed from the disciplines of nursing and allied health, medicine, and psychology. Results: Findings from this analysis revealed a complexity to desire among gbMSM that extended well beyond engagement in radical sexual practices and into dimensions of desire for connection, freedom, and acceptance. These revelations were applied to demonstrate how nurses' beliefs about desire and subsequent regulations for "good health" can inhibit the ways in which desire is produced among gbMSM. Implications for Practice: Such findings demonstrate a need to develop future approaches for nursing practice that recognize the innate value and individual perspectives about desire held by this group, which can be uniquely tailored to meet their health needs.

From domestication to imperial patronage: Deconstructing the biomedicalisation of occupational therapy.

Occupational therapy knowledge emerged in the 19th century as reformist movements responded to the industrialisation of society and capitalist expansion. In the Global North, it was institutionalised by State apparatuses during the First and Second World Wars. Although biomedicine contributed to the rapid expansion and establishment of occupational therapy as a health discipline, its domestication by the biomedical model led to an overly regulated profession that betrays its reformist ideals. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, our aim in this article is to deconstruct the biomedicalisation of occupational therapy and demonstrate how resistance to this process is critical for the future of this discipline. The use of arts and crafts in occupational therapy may be conceptualised as a 'nomad science' aesthetically resisting the domination of industrialism and medical reductionism. Through the war efforts, a coalition of progressive nurses, social workers, teachers, artisans and activists metamorphosed into occupational therapists. As it did with nursing, biomedicine proceeded to domesticate occupational therapy through a form of 'imperial' patronage subsequently embodied in the evidence-based movement. 'Occupational' jargon is widely used today and may be viewed as the product of a profession trying to establish itself as an autonomous discipline that imposes its own regime of truth. Given the symbolic violence underlying this patronage, the future of occupational therapy should not mean behaving according to biomedicine's terms. As a discipline, occupational therapy must resist the appropriation of its 'war machine' and craft its own terms through the release of new creative energy.

Becoming frail: A more than human exploration.

'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily presentation, with numerous scores and measures to support its clinical determination. While these tools are typically quantitative in nature and based primarily on physical capacity, qualitative research has revealed that frailty is also associated with a range of social, economic and environmental factors. Here, we progress the understanding of frailty in older people via a new materialist synthesis of recent qualitative studies of frailty and ageing. We replace a conception of frailty as a bodily attribute with a relational understanding of a 'frailty assemblage'. Within this more-than-human assemblage, materialities establish the on-going 'becoming' of the frail body. What clinicians refer to as 'frailty' is one becoming among many, produced during the daily activities and interactions of older people. Acknowledging the complexity of these more-than-human becomings is essential to make sense of frailty, and how to support and enhance the lives of frail older people.

O rizoma de Yuggoth: modular Deleuze / Yuggoth's rhizome: modular Deleuze / Rizoma de Yuggoth: Deleuze modular

Vamos abordar o campo deleuziano a partir de alguns autores que consideramos precisos em relação à ressonância com a obra de Deleuze, realizando, em seguida, uma crítica a outros autores desse mesmo campo, que consideramos imprecisos, o que nos levará a avaliar como intercessores de Deleuze, como Hume e Nietzsche, podem ser modulados hoje, seja intensificando seus conceitos ou avaliando sua real necessidade. Finalmente, vamos sugerir alguns desdobramentos no campo deleuziano que consideramos relevantes. Para tanto, abordaremos a obra do antropólogo Tim Ingold, a do escritor H. P. Lovecraft, o atual cinema escandinavo, a mística, entre outros temas.

We will approach the Deleuzian field starting from some authors that we consider precise in relation to the resonance with Deleuze's work, and then perform a critique of other authors in the same field, which we consider imprecise, which will lead us to evaluate how Deleuze's intercessors, such as Hume and Nietzsche, can be modulated today, either by intensifying their concepts or by evaluating the actual necessity for their work. Finally, we will suggest some unfoldings in the Deleuzian field that we consider relevant. To this end, we will address the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, the writer H.P. Lovecraft, the current Scandinavian cinema, and mysticism, among other themes.

A partir de comentarios sobre autores deleuzianos como Massumi y Culp, criticaremos a algunos autores que participan en el campo deleuziano, pero consideramos sus obras imprecisas, en el sentido de Deleuze. A continuación, evaluaremos cómo los intercesores de Deleuze como Hume y Nietzsche pueden modularse hoy, ya sea intensificando sus conceptos o evaluando su necesidad real. Finalmente, sugeriremos algunos desarrollos en el campo deleuziano que consideramos relevantes. Para ello, abordaremos la obra del antropólogo Tim Ingold, la de H. P. Lovecraft, el cine escandinavo actual, la mística, entre otros temas.

Dancing at the end of the world? Psychoanalysis, climate change and joy.

This paper attempts to join the dots between psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic perspectives in relation to climate change and the ecological crisis and to begin a discussion on the role of joy in sustaining ourselves in the face of the global catastrophe. There is a vital expanding psychoanalytic literature addressing itself to the environmental crisis but a striking absence on joy and what stands in its way. This paper explores what psychoanalysis has to offer in the context of planetary emergency and also asks psychoanalysis to look beyond itself and reimagine what it can be. Joy involves a simultaneous affirmation of both our uniqueness and our togetherness, not only as humans but with all forms of life and the web of life itself. If we were to allow ourselves to actually enjoy our lives, we just might fight harder against our extinction.

Cet article tente d'établir une passerelle entre les perspectives psychanalytiques et post-psychanalytiques concernant le changement climatique et la crise écologique, et de lancer une discussion sur le rôle de la joie pour nous soutenir face à la perspective d'une catastrophe globale. Pendant que des régions entières sont soit en train de brûler soit en train de s'enfoncer dans les eaux, nous nous trouvons dans une faillite psychosociale généralisée, une folie à l'intérieur de laquelle il devient de plus en plus difficile de penser, et encore plus d'agir, alors même que notre survie en dépend. La psyché a besoin de guérison à tous les niveaux. La joie comprend l'affirmation simultanée de notre singularité et de notre lien à l'autre, pas seulement en tant qu'humains mais avec toutes les formes de vie et avec le tissu même de la vie. Je soutiens que nous devons développer une approche psychanalytique plus profonde de la joie et découvrir ce qui lui fait obstacle. Si nous nous permettions de vraiment savourer notre vie, peut-être que nous lutterions plus fort contre notre extinction.

El presente trabajo intenta integrar las perspectivas psicoanalítica y pos-psicoanalítica con relación al cambio climático y a la crisis ecológica, y comenzar una discusión sobre la función del júbilo para sostenernos a nosotros mismos frente a la catástrofe global. A medida que regiones enteras del planeta arden en fuego o se hunden en el océano, nos encontramos a nosotros mismos en una desintegración psicosocial generalizada, una locura dentro de la cual es cada vez más difícil pensar, y mucho menos actuar, aun cuando nuestra supervivencia de ello dependa. La psique necesita sanarse a todos los niveles. El júbilo conlleva una afirmación simultánea tanto de nuestra singularidad como de nuestro sentimiento de unidad con otros, no solamente humanos, sino con todas las formas vivientes y con la trama de la vida misma. Planteo la necesidad de desarrollar un abordaje psicoanalítico más profundo en torno al júbilo y descubrir aquello que se interpone en el camino. Si pudiésemos permitirnos a nosotros mismos disfrutar de nuestras vidas, podríamos luchar con más fuerza contra nuestra extinción.

How Do You Touch an Impossible Thing?

How, and how much, physiotherapists should touch in practice is once again being debated by the profession. COVID-19 and people's enforced social isolation, combined with the growth of virtual technologies, and the profession's own turn away from so-called "passive" therapies, has placed therapeutic touch once again in an uncertain position. The situation is more ambiguous and uncertain because, despite its historical importance to the profession, physiotherapists have never articulated a comprehensive philosophy of touch, taking-for-granted its seeming obviousness as either a bio-physical or inter-subjective phenomenon. But both of these approaches are limited, with one failing to account for the existential and socio-cultural significance of touch, and the other rejecting the reality of the physical body altogether. And both are narrowly humanistic. Since touch occurs between all entities throughout the cosmos, and human touch makes up only an infinitesimally small part of this, physiotherapy's approach to touch seems paradoxically to be at the same time both highly reductive and ontologically vague. Given physiotherapists' much vaunted claim to be experts in therapeutic touch, it would seem timely to theorize how touch operates and when touch becomes therapeutic. In this paper I draw on Gilles Deleuze's machine ontology as a new way to think about touch. Critiquing existing approaches, I argue that machine ontology provides a more robust and inclusive philosophy of touch, pointing to some radical new possibilities for the physical therapies.

Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth.

The relationship between 'philosophy' and the 'geo' has received renewed attention with the rise of the terrestrial and the planetary as leitmotifs for thinking about the collective subjectivation of particular kinds of world. In some of these conversations, this relationship is developed to consider how social collectives emerge with the production of particular kinds of territorial abstraction. Three decades since Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published What is Philosophy?, book that has a lasting legacy in developing geophilosophy as a particular mode of transcendental empirical enquiry, this special issue revisits the relationship between geophilosophy and the production of an alternative sense of the earth. In this introduction, we approach geophilosophy in its pluralism by showing how the concept does not only concern the question of how to retain a sense of difference and contingency in thought, but also concerns a mode of enquiry that presents opportunities to experiment with alternative forms of collective subjectivation. Assaying the legacy of Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy on contemporary forms of earth-thinking, the article identifies the unique demands and geophilosophical possibilities taken up by the contributors to this issue that question how to recuperate another sense of the earth.

Shame as a geophilosophical force.

In this article, I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's famous trope about "an earth and a people that are lacking" in the Geophilosophy chapter of What Is Philosophy? must be examined through a specific assemblage: the necessity for shame-as a powerful, non-psychological, and nonhuman affect-to enter philosophy itself both to resist stupidity and to include all the disfranchised of classical Reason. I then turn to Isabelle Stengers' work against stupidity to determine how this assemblage can help us give shape to new multispecies apparatuses in the face of the Anthropocene. As a conclusion, I show that, through such apparatuses, shame truly becomes a geophilosophical force.

COVID-19 in the United States as affective frame.

In this paper I attempt to contribute to the developing field of "political philosophy of mind." To render concrete the notion of "affective frame," a social situation which pre-selects for salience and valence of environmental factors relative to a subject's life, I conduct a case study of a deleterious socially instituted affective frame, which, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, produced individuated circumstances that came crashing down on "essential workers" who were forced into a double bind. We saw here an untenable and ultimately fatal situation that forced a choice between, on the one hand, increasing the risk of their failing to provide financial support for their family if they quit their job or reduced their hours, and on the other, increasing their risk of contracting the virus by continuing to work. The case study will thus be itself an affective frame that will bring to the fore for its readers a nexus of harmful social practices of contemporary American society. Form is reinforced by content here, as this particular affective frame brings forth a further emphasis on affect when we focus on workers simultaneously socialized into roles as breadwinners and as members of the caring professions. For those people, quitting work becomes even more difficult as they come to affirm their self-identity of being providers of affective labor for those in their care at work and of being the affective anchor of family life at home, the one who financially helps keep a roof over the heads of their loved ones as well as being the emotional backbone of the family. Hence the affective frame of "essential workers in Covid times" renders salient and affirmatively valenced their affectively laden self-image as caring helpers of those in need, at home and at work.

The line of vulnerability in a recovery assemblage.

From a developmental-psychological perspective, young people's recovery from drug misuse requires building up internal resilience and mobilising external resources to develop and maintain a shield of invulnerability. Vulnerability, in this context, is typically understood in terms of the material, social and/or affective conditions of drug use. These conditions are often targeted in prevention and intervention efforts, while also featuring in the emergence of recovery-oriented policy and treatment agendas internationally. In these ways, drug treatment programs implicitly impose vulnerability as a pre-condition to justify intervention and control, just as vulnerabilities are reproduced through the physical and social isolation that individuals experience in treatment. In this article we challenge normative understandings of recovery that regard vulnerability as an inherent condition of 'risk' and 'relapse' for those 'in recovery'. The article bridges interdisciplinary research to offer an analysis grounded in Deleuzian ideas for understanding vulnerability - an area for which his philosophy has been largely overlooked. As the case of recovery unravels, we analyse vulnerability in recovery as affirmative; as an ongoing transformative force of becoming-well.

Response-The Multiple Understandings in the Clinic Do Not Always Need to be Resolved.

This article reflects on the assumption underlying the argument of Little et al. that "contested understandings" in the clinic are susceptible to reconciliation within a liberal framework described as "pragmatic pluralism". It is argued that no such reconciliation is possible or desirable because it is of the nature of the clinic that it provides a forum for multiple voices, ethical and cultural perspectives, and conceptual frameworks, and this is the source of its fecundity and creativity. Medicine itself cannot be represented by a single discourse, precisely because it is itself an unruly collection of practices that, despite their heterogeneity, are able to engage in productive dialogues with each other. The heteroglossia of the clinic, therefore, is not a problem to be overcome. Rather, it is a rich resource to be mobilized in accordance with its multiple inherent purposes.

The body politics of successful ageing in the nexus of health, well-being and energy consumption practices.

In this paper, we introduce the idea of the bio-socio-material body to think through the body politics that emerge within the nexus of health, well-being and domestic energy consumption as people age. Our work draws upon an ethnographic study with older Australians in regional New South Wales, Australia. We enrich social practice theory conceptualisations by foregrounding the body as a dynamic bio-socio-material entity that shapes and is shaped by practices. In doing so, we draw attention to the body politics of managing health, well-being and energy consumption while trying to age successfully. We identify that the bio-socio-material dimensions of the body play an important role in how health, well-being and energy practices are performed. Energy practices are bound up in understandings of health and well-being as an ongoing and contingent process. Here, the use of energy and appliances becomes integral to how people negotiate and work towards successful ageing. We found that embodied practices of health, well-being and energy consumption are linked to biological, emotional, affective, social and material concerns that create body politics. These include tensions and challenges relating to health and vitality, caring for the sick and the dying, maintaining good mental health, the affordances of buildings and appliances, energy affordability and billing anxiety, social connectedness, and pleasures and pains. We raise questions emerging from our research on the implications for successful ageing. We call for attention to how health, well-being and energy are imbricated and for policy and programmes that better support older people to navigate the nexus of health, well-being and energy consumption as they age.

Gilles Deleuze's societies of control: Implications for mental health nursing and coercive community care.

Since the era of deinstitutionalisation, many clinical approaches have emerged to enable the care and treatment of people suffering from mental illness. In recent years, the use of coercive approaches in the community (e.g., outpatient commitment or community treatment orders) has also increased internationally. Although nurses' role regarding these coercive approaches is central and significant, few empirical and theoretical writings have tackled this controversial nursing practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyse coercive nursing care through the lens of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'societies of control'. Taking up Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary power, Deleuze explores how the move from the striated spaces of closed institutions to the smooth spaces of societies of control took place since the middle of the 20th century. According to Deleuze, the overall objective of 'societies of control' is no longer simply to govern deviant behaviour in closed environments (e.g., psychiatric hospitals and prisons) but to ensure a regime of unrelentless surveillance in the open spaces of our communities.

Assembling bodies-without-organs: A poststructuralist analysis of group sex between men.

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a 'radical' practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations-prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk-averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are 'bodies without organs'. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of 'boundary play' and 'bodies without organs' helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants.

Becoming-Perverse: Queering Sworn Brotherhood in the Non/Human Realm of Songzhuxuan's Hailiwa and Daokousu.

This article examines the pornographic representation of Hailiwa and Daokousu, from Songzhuxuan's novel Yaohu Yanshi, where a sworn brotherhood incorporates an egalitarian homosexual relationship, something highly unusual in the Qing context in which sexual acts, including same-sex ones, were intelligible only via unequal hierarchies. In so doing we explore the queer potentialities of sworn brotherhood, signifying fraternity, friendship and a sexual relationship simultaneously. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, queer theory, and Giffney and Hird's concept of the non/human, we argue this tale and its wider genre enriches the scope of what we might term "queer literatures" in offering us historically and culturally situated stories of desire that refuse to confine themselves to the binaries that supported conventional premodern Chinese understandings of gender and sexuality-including the Confucian model of the heterosexual family unit, but also the highly hierarchical notions of sexual status underpinning Qing conceptualizations of sexual acts.