Part 5

Supportive Houses for persons diagnosed with serious mental disorders as sociocultural sceneries

Supportive Houses for persons diagnosed with serious mental disorders as sociocultural sceneries: A methodological and theoretical proposal from the sociocultural psychology

Javier Saavedra
Universidad de Sevilla. Dep. Psicología experimental
fjsaavedra@us.es

Abstract
Supportive houses for persons diagnosed with mental serious disorders are essential for a system based on the community mental health. Nevertheless, beyond the recognition of the patients’ life quality improve who live in these supportive houses, it has been researched little on the influence of these sceneries in the recovery’s process of the residents. In this sense, it’s especially important the possibility of constructing alternative identities to the "patient" role in these scenery. It’s necessary to define these sceneries in a complex way in order to start investigating how social environments can help to reconstruct the identity of the persons diagnosed with mental serious disorders and contribute to their recovery. The methodological and theoretical contributions of sociocultural psychology can help us in this task. The sociocultural psychology, Vigotsky was one of the founders this theory, studies how the cultural, historical and institutional sceneries by means symbolic and material mediators are related dialectically to the cognitive resources of the human beings. Concepts which come from of this tradition as "sociocultural sceneries ", "privilegiación", " activity " and " practice" will be used in this paper. A sociocultural analysis of these sceneries needs a description of the following basic dimensions: 1) Concrete activities in the scenery
2) Interactive daily patterns in the scenery: Objective aspects like verbal exchange, space – temporal context, not verbal communication, etc. And also a subjective aspects evaluation, intentions, expectations, values, beliefs, how do the interactions’ participants define the context?
3) Institutional: organizational norms and rules. How does the institution define the scenery?

Key words: Recovery, Socio-Cultural Psychology, Supportive Houses.

Author(s)

Javier Saavedra

Javier Saavedra
Universidad de Sevilla. Dep. Psicología experimental
fjsaavedra@us.es

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