Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a case study of young New Zealanders’ uses of health apps and other digital technologies, this paper examines changing understandings and enactments of responsibility for mental wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

Questions of how to best harness digital technologies for promoting

mental health have become a hotbed of governmental, health policy and

social debate. Campaigns for optimizing digital healthcare generally

focus on promoting patient responsibilization or self-responsibility,

emphasizing encouraging the development of more informed patients who

draw on digital resources as part of self-care strategies, deepening and

expanding their health-related knowledge as well as enabling easy forms

of self-tracking. Arguably, however, while “self-care” often involves

the promotion of patient self-responsibility, it simultaneously

foregrounds other modes of ethical engagement, such as care for, or

from, (known and unknown) others and concerns over states’ and

corporations’ responsibilities for ensuring mental wellbeing. Indeed,

the broader literature on responsibility suggests that rather than an

overriding emphasis on personal responsibility, advanced liberal

societies create a much more fertile and contested ground upon which

multiple, “competing responsibilities” can flourish. Digital

technologies, moreover, add additional layers to how responsibility is

enacted, reshaping experiences of time and space by enabling new forms

of continuous, or seemingly continuous, person-person and

person-technology relations, and consequently refracting users’ sense of

where agency lies (i.e. in themselves, in their relations with (human)

others, or in technologies themselves). Drawing on a case study of a

newly emerging ethics of care that is being developed through young New

Zealanders’ uses of health apps and other digital technologies for

promoting mental health, this paper examines how interpersonal dynamics,

human-technology relations, and questions of agency are recasting

understandings and enactments of responsibility for mental wellbeing.