A critical posthuman geography of digital youth mental health

Williams, Jessy ORCID: 0000-0002-2816-5750 (2024). A critical posthuman geography of digital youth mental health. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis explores young people’s experiences of using digital technologies designed to support mental health and wellbeing, such as smartphone apps, chatbots and digital platforms. It critically examines the digital youth mental healthcare assemblage in the context of urgent unmet needs, long waiting lists and the turn towards digital mental healthcare in England. It draws on qualitative data from 40 interviews and two focus groups with three groups of participants: young people (aged 16 to 25) who use digital technologies for their mental health and wellbeing, practitioners who work within youth mental health and emotional wellbeing services, researchers and developers of digital mental health. Firstly, this thesis enquires into the logics and practices of digital mental health using a broadly posthuman geographical conceptual framework and assemblage theory. Secondly, the thesis addresses how digital mental health technologies, services and interventions are changing the ways young people know, engage and intervene in their own mental health and wellbeing. Literatures on digitally mediated experience and psychoanalytic geographies support this endeavour.

Across three empirical chapters, the thesis examines how digital technologies change mental health support, therapy and relationships. I explore young people’s experiences of digital mental health and examine how certain components of therapeutic relationships are primed for automation. I show how mental health and wellbeing apps mediate young people’s experiences of using them, temporally, through cues to ‘check in’. This shapes reflective capacities and can have unintentional effects, such as repetitive introspection. Reflection is generated as part of an associated milieu of data, practices and logics with recursive functions. I use assemblage as a method to identify material and discursive components, relations and forces that assemble digital youth mental healthcare. Secondly, I use assemblage to analyse relations of dependency between components and how capitalism and psychopower organises the arrangement. Overall, this thesis contributes to contemporary understandings of digital therapeutic relations and gives insight into the status of digital youth mental healthcare in England and beyond. In doing so, it advances a critical posthumanist geography that takes seriously the material capacities of digital technologies, without losing sight of the humanness of the concept of the psyche and therapeutic relations, or the production of these by technoscientific capitalism.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):