Critical Social Theory and the Politics of Narrative in the Mental Health Professions: The Mental Health Film Festival as an Emerging Postmodern Praxis

Film festivals serving equity-seeking groups with their associated post-screening panel discussions have increasingly emerged within Western popular culture as discursive terrains where a range of cultural and specialist discourses are contested. As such, these events have the inherent potential for providing audience members with uncommon opportunities to become cultural producers of meaning relevant to their lives. While the same might be said of other public cultural events, the rising predominance of visual culture in contemporary Western society, not only in the arts, but in other sectors as well, such as education, confers an unprecedented cultural status to film events. Given the contested nature of culture as a socio-political construct in Western society, there is a corollary pedagogical capital associated with public film events. Using critical social theories, the aim of this article is to reconceptualise the mental health film festival (MHFF) as a site of emerging postmodern praxis. As such, I argue that the MHFF has the potential to articulate an a priori transformative relationship amongst narrative exhibition, audience reception, participant production and discourse distribution. Such potential problematises the hierarchical structuring of the processes of knowledge production and reception that inform modern foundationalist epistemologies. Drawing on critical psychiatry, critical social work and critical pedagogy, this article attempts to describe how the application of critical social and narrative theory transform the theoretical and practice boundaries of these disciplines, and combine to create a lens through which the MHFF can be reconceptualised as a unique cultural site and community resource for mental health service users where nonclinical therapy, education and unofficial social work happen. Attending more closely to the everyday activities, interests and concerns of mental health service users as they are expressed within the MHFF, critical social workers can combine their role as expert producer with that of cultural receiver, in effect becoming an 'audience' conscientiously observant of service users narratives with the aim of transforming service users' narrative possibilities as well as their own.