Investigating the Relationship of Interaction with One’s Environment: An Approach of People Positioning Themselves as Mental Health Peers
This article retraces the sensitive and intellectual journey of users of the mental health system in France, who have become pairadvocates, in support of access to rights and recourse alongside other users. This process consists in elaborating, through experience and as it progresses, their principles of action in pairadvocacy and user representation practices. Three of them are given here: From the problem-person to the problem-situation; Interactions to be questioned and challenged; Being the address of the other to understand and act. The article addresses the anthropological, sociological, societal, and political context in which this practice of pairadvocacy evolves. This context and this approach, according to pairadvocacy practices, are exemplary of an appropriation of their environment by people who have many reasons to think of themselves as excluded, as strangers. A first step towards inclusive thinking, perhaps.