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Interdisciplinary social sciences literature on the value and significance of engaged fatherhood and father-inclusive approaches to practice for enhanced family outcomes have begun to reach a consensus. Yet there has been less attention to how research knowledge about fatherhood, including that which is co-produced with and for fathers, can be more effectively translated and embedded in practice and policy contexts. This article elaborates on a cumulative, empirically driven process that has established new relational ecologies between young fathers, multi-agency professionals and researchers. It illustrates how these ecologies, supported by longitudinal and co-creative research combined, are driving societal transformations through knowledge exchange and the instigation of new father-inclusive practice interventions that address the marginalisation of young fathers. The methodologies, including the co-creation of the Young Dads Collective and its impacts on young fathers and multi-agency professionals, are evaluated, confirming them as powerful and productive mechanisms for embedding father-inclusive practices within existing support and policy systems.
Parental love has been studied in relation to infants and younger children. The adult sons and daughters who marry and become parents constitute another category of ‘children’. As the earlier literature did not explore parental love in relation to these ‘adult married sons and daughters’ earlier, the current study was the first-ever effort in this regard. The study was conducted in two phases and involved 982 purposely selected participants. A new scale to measure love was also developed and validated during the two phases of the study. The findings revealed significant differences in paternal and maternal love between married and unmarried sons and daughters. The findings of the study would serve as a novel contribution to the existing literature on parental love. The newly developed ‘Love Scale’ would facilitate future researchers in exploring love in a general way that could be applied to all possible relationships.
Civil partnerships were extended to mixed-sex couples in England and Wales at the end of 2019, shortly followed by Northern Ireland (2020) and Scotland (2021). Since then, thousands of mixed-sex couples have entered a civil partnership. While civil partnerships were favoured by politicians as an alternative to legal rights for cohabitants, we know little about why mixed-sex couples would choose a civil partnership. In 2020–21 we interviewed individuals and couples who had entered or were planning a mixed-sex civil partnership (MSCP) to explore this further. We find that MSCPs are constructed in opposition to the ‘traditional’ image of marriage/weddings and yet symbolic elements including dress, form and structure are necessarily relied on in constructing something new, via a process of bricolage. Moreover, through civil partnership motivation talk, mixed-sex couples are constructing an individual morality that is centred on resisting cultural norms, advocating equality and justice, and pragmatic love.
Couple relationships and money practices are intimately connected. Money can often cause disagreement and conflict within couples and represents symbolic values and expectations between partners. This study adopts a practices approach to exploring money practices among Swedish couples in the third age (60–80 years old) through 17 semi-structured interviews. We focus particularly on how money practices constitute and are constituted by dimensions of ‘being and doing couple’. We find that money practices both reflect and constitute couplehood. Our analysis has revealed that money practices are interlinked with couplehood through the primary themes of togetherness, fairness and trust, independence and finally, a reluctance to imagine oneself outside of couplehood, for other reasons than widowhood.
This article draws on the lived experience of the author to discuss the Black mixed-raced experience of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), particularly in relation to the BPD symptom of troubled identities. This article argues that what psychiatry pathologises as a troubled identity within BPD is actually an everyday experience for a mixed-race person growing up between cultures. This article goes on to discuss Black mixed-race people’s identity through a lens of performativity, how this presents and is weaponised in psychiatry, and why it is important for psychiatry to understand Black mixed-race identities.
This article begins with two situated knowledges drawn from my lived experience as a feminist researcher with a ‘borderline personality disorder’ diagnosis. The first knowledge is that diagnostic and medicalised ways of framing experience (particularly the experience labelled ‘BPD’) can constitute a kind of cruel optimism, which arises ‘when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’ and becomes ‘an obstacle to your flourishing’ (). The second knowledge is that while the label ‘BPD’ is stigmatising, pathologising and highly gendered, it refers not only to a real experience but to valuable ways of being/becoming and knowing. Here I make the case for recasting the borderline not as a patient to be diagnosed but, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a diagnostician whose ‘symptoms’ are the traces of unjust and harmful frameworks that work upon us all. Building on the important work of Margaret Price, whose writing on psychosocial disabilities and epistemic injustice produced the concept of counter-diagnosis, I have developed a methodology I call autø/gnøsis. Using a new materialist approach (Deleuze, Braidotti, Barad), autø/gnøsis thinks through and with the borderline self and borderline knowledges, while also acknowledging the shifting, unsteady void at the centre of these concepts.
Many people have been labelled with psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ such as ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’. That was one of the labels that was bestowed on me, amongst others, incorrectly. This poem speaks to what I experienced.
Domestic violence impedes women’s exercise of full participatory citizenship. This article explicates the role of family, community and social networks in the aftermath of an abusive relationship as both an indicator of intimate citizenship as an achieved status and as a facilitator of the process of citizenisation in the private and public spheres. Based on life history interviews with 26 South Asian women in the UK, the findings reveal the myriad ways in which denial of citizenship continues long after, and in part due to, the end of the abusive relationship, and outline women’s efforts to regain a sense of identity, belongingness and membership within their intimate, family and community lives. In doing so, this article advances conceptual understandings of the lived practice of citizenship. It also problematises the binary construction of ‘victims’ versus ‘survivors’, which is premised on a linear and successful journey towards citizenisation following the end of the abusive relationship.
The number of people living alone is increasing in Finland (; ), in Europe () and globally. Individualisation is growing, and many public institutions are adjusting to the rising number of single clientele. At the same time, the couple norm persists, and monogamous partnering is still often seen as the most appropriate way to organise intimate adult life. In this study, we analysed the written stories of 19 single men aged 29–64 and found that the couple norm was predominant in their stories. Internalisation of the norm caused feelings of inadequacy, a lack of self-appreciation and uncertainty about the future. Many men attributed their singlehood to events in their past and felt a lack of agency at present.
The healthcare experience of many people carrying the label ‘borderline personality disorder (BPD)’ is one of exclusion, discrimination and neglect. The letters ‘BPD’ replace our very humanity, trampling our right to receive evidence-based, appropriate, lawful and compassionate care. Within mental health services our pain, distress, unusual experiences and self-harm/suicidal actions have been reconceptualised as ‘behavioural’ issues, encouraging the promotion of punitive and cruel responses from professionals in an attempt to discourage us from seeking help. ‘Responsibilisation’ narratives, which prioritise personal independence over all else, legitimise institutional neglect. We are told suicide is a choice we have the capacity to make, while care is actively withheld to avoid us becoming dependent on support. Despite the rising suicide rates of people labelled with a personality disorder diagnosis in the UK, our risk continues to be downplayed; rewritten as a risk of death by ‘misadventure’; and accepted by services and coroners as a justifiable outcome of so-called ‘less is more’ care plans. This article explores the current mental health service landscape in which prejudice and stigma direct ‘BPD’ care through the creation and maintenance of clinical mythology, which despite its popularity across healthcare teams, is not supported by ongoing research findings and recommendations.
