The ordeal of belonging: home-making and supported housing for people living with mental health conditions in France
This article analyzes, on the one hand, housing and home support for people leaving with mental health conditions and, on the other hand, the difficulties of belonging and home-making that they face. This analysis is based on a field survey carried out in a French metropolis within a team delivering home-based care for psychiatric patients living in supported housing. Our results show that, while this team seeks to secure cohabitation, by trying to prevent and regulate housing practices that are considered deviant (home isolation, negligence, squatting, drug use, for example), residents express feelings of insecurity (i.e. instability) and show difficulties of taking possession of home that are associated with their vulnerable and fragmented residential trajectories, and with their living and housing conditions (economic deprivation, weight of cohabitation rules, uncertainty about their future housing situation). We seek to demonstrate, by integrating the point of view of residents, how practices that are supposed to promote the social inclusion of stigmatized people in and through housing can actually shape mechanisms for regulating and controlling their everyday living and mobility practices and, therefore, the exercise of their citizenship.