The approach to standardized services in Norwegian mental health care is tailored to the needs of the majority population, focusing on diagnoses and overshadows an approach that understands, values and emphasizes Sámi storytelling and everyday life. This study aims to contribute knowledge regarding the promotion of user involvement in mental health care from the perspectives of Sámi mental health care users. A narrative approach offers an opportunity to unravel an indigenous approach to mental health care and user involvement. People organize their storytelling according to culturally available narratives. This paper focuses on 9 Sámi men’s and women’s stories related to user involvement in mental health care services. Through a thematic analysis of personal stories, we emphasize how the participants make sense of their needs as patients in a culturally adapted mental health context and their experiences living in Sámi core areas. The following four themes are identified as prerequisites for user involvement in services: (1) the expectation of raising children to be independent, (2) the importance of accepting and recognizing the Sámi identity, (3) the need to live in close relations with nature and family, and 4) the right to be in the Sámi mode. Based on the results of our analysis, we find that user involvement among Sámi mental health care users is related to important Sámi values and norms within the culture and that treatment without these important values could adversely affect user involvement in mental health services.
Performing autoethnography is a dynamic and dialogic exercise, transgressing and exceeding traditional expectations of academic papers. In this freely spoken piece—of narratives, thoughts, poems, and reflections—you will meet three international mental health scholar-researchers seeking and deepening connection through friendship. The article began as a single story and developed, as stories often do, to become many stories. It is conversational, shifting discursively across many topics, including diagnosis, medication, mental health demedicalization and recovery, cultural colonization, language, narrative and human abuse, identity, human connection, being outside the academic mainstream, ethnicity, time, and transitions. It is a story of telling stories.
This essay aims to contribute to the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on a Norwegian- Russian social work research project. The reflexive act of writing about the project’s disrupted startup is an exercise of flexibility and dynamics in the research process. Well known grips for those of us working with qualitative inquiry. Still, the unpredictable landscape, uncertainty of what would come next, and the insecurity in the present moved us as researchers towards new local and contextual knowledge, forced by the pandemic’s extensive effects.
Background: There is a need for qualitative studies on imposed innovation in home care services in welfare societies. The municipalities are key actors in the field of innovation in the public sector. As innovations often are interpreted to be in conflict with values in health care, we need knowledge on how policy changes and imposed innovations are understood and handled by middle managers working in the sector. Aim: We aim to explore how middle managers react to imposed innovation in health services through their storytelling. The research question was ''What can middle managers' stories of imposed innovation tell us about their role in, and some important prerequisites for, innovation processes in municipal health-care services?'' Methods: A narrative study of experiences with municipal innovation among middle managers in Norway. In this article, we do a thematic analysis of interviews with seven female middle managers who work in a home care service department. Findings: The study develops an understanding of which frameworks are required within a home care service to meet constant demands for innovation. Innovations are understood by the managers as results of policy changes and new public management demands and as a troublesome burden. We find the prerequisites for implementing innovations to be (1) trustbased management, (2) flexibility and dynamics, (3) continuity of care, and (4) emphasis on competence. These prerequisites are further interpreted in relation to dominant discourses on innovation at the macro, meso, and micro levels within the storytelling contexts. Conclusion: Imposed innovations require a negotiating practice in cross-disciplinary environments at all levels in the organization.
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