Paper short abstract:

With a critical medical anthropological gaze, a tragic public death of a man in the street of Oslo in 2021 is analyzed. The ethnographic story disentangles the context of sociality and cultural competence to explore the use of lay competence within the clinical mental health services.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the tragic public death of a young man in Oslo, Norway back in November 2021. The tragic event allows us to explore how professional and lay people can collaborate in the mental health treatment process. Following this, the paper explores the interface between mobility, migration, substance abuse and mental illness practices within the mental health care systems. The personal story reveals ways a man can succeed in mobility as a personal carrier, from the country of origin, following the process of making a life in Norway with mother and aunt, and later on establish a new family, new identity with friends, and lastly being admitted to the Oslo National Academy of Arts. The life-story enhance both successes and situations of substance abuse and psychosis symptoms. The tragic event allows us to explore how professional and lay people can collaborate in the mental health treatment process. The story reveals limitation in the treatment process, and this paper discuss how the complex context of human sociality could have been acknowledged in the treatment process and ways that could have contributed to a more holistic understanding of the person in context. The event reveals a tension within the mental health services and involving relationships within the clinical setting. The paper explores these practices in the light of the concepts of embodiment (Csordas, 1994) and ethics of care, concepts of autonomy and inter-dependency (Tronto, 2020). Hence the paper discusses models of care that open up for practices of sociality that incorporate social relations and cultural competence - approaches that open up for lay counselling and peer support within the mental health care system (e.g., Kleinman’s explanatory models and the Cultural Formulations Interview that build culturally sensitive services and is integrated into mental health care services. (L,J Kirmayer et al.2020, American Psychiatric Association, ICF ).