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Towards social inclusion in mental health?

Justine Schneider is Professor of Mental Health and Social Care, a joint post in the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and the University of Nottingham (School of Sociology and Social Policy, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Email: Justine.Schneider{at}nottingham.ac.uk). She is affiliated to Nottingham’s Institute of Mental Health. Carole J. Bramley is currently a freelance researcher. Her previous employment was as a lecturer/researcher in the School of Psychology and School of Community, Health Sciences and Social Care at the University of Salford. Her main academic interests include adoption and mental well-being.

This article explores the uses of the terms social exclusion and social inclusion in a mental health context. We briefly describe the origins of the term social exclusion and analyse its connotations in relation to four key dimensions: the relative, multifactorial, dynamic and transactional. We discuss Levitas’s three discourses concerning social exclusion (the redistributionist, moral underclass and social integrationist) and present a case in favour of a fourth perspective, societal oppression. Focusing on social inclusion as a remedy for the ills of social exclusion, we discuss implications for contemporary mental health policy, practice and research. We highlight the potential contribution of social psychology to social inclusion theory. We conclude that a better theoretical understanding of causal mechanisms is needed to enable the development of more socially inclusive mental health services.