Paper short abstract:

For Juan Marconi, psychiatry's purpose was to become a collectively owned resource. This required a transition from institutions to "community" and from capitalism to a classless society. I will use his work to discuss current notions of participation and community in mental health research

Paper long abstract:

Regardless of the barriers limiting service-user engagement and community involvement in mental health research, the principle of participation has gained broad support. Increasingly, international agencies expect participation from the projects they endorse worldwide.

When the selection of projects depends on their participatory character, a structural need for criteria emerges. To maximise their chances, researchers will adapt their projects to these criteria. Funded projects will share an increasingly standardised and ethnocentric understanding of participation, community and politics in the mental health field.

Can this cycle be challenged? Rather than proposing a superior alternative, this paper examines a contrasting case in the complex and diverse history of participatory mental health research. Juan Marconi's seminal project for a "Cultural Revolution in Mental Health Programmes", developed through the 1960s and 1970s in Chile, is introduced. For him, the idea of "revolution" expressed the dialectical relationship between transitioning from psychiatric institutions and towards "communities" and a transition towards a classless, socialist society. The challenge for psychiatry was to place itself in the hands of the masses, becoming a collectively owned resource.

Although Marconi's utopian version of mental health reform -and the socialist project as a whole- clashed against a dictatorship that lasted 17 years, his ideas demonstrate the multiple configurations, trajectories, and ambitions that participation has mobilised in different eras and geographies. This includes the ambition of articulating our response to mental illness with a broader struggle for a fairer society.