Not a display of emotions’: emotional geographies in the Scottish Highlands

It was many years before I could walk through the street and hold my head up and feel that, you know, … I belonged. … [F]or many years, I felt … I felt that I didn’t belong here, you know, I didn’t feel like I was part of the community. [Member of a discussion group consisting of people experiencing mental health problems and living in the Skye and Lochalsh area]This chapter is concerned with the emotional geographies of people with mental health problems living in the rural and remote places of the Scottish Highlands. It draws on empirical materials from a qualitative research project with over 100 users of mental health services (see Parr et al. 2004). This work has repeatedly highlighted emotional issues: why and how some interviewees feel supported, included and cared for, and how others feel rejected, excluded and isolated (as in the above quotation). We have encountered a diversity of emotional states, bound into a variety of relations, practices and exchanges, some of which reflect specific ‘illness’ experiences, but others of which are clearly framed by the micro-dynamics of community life in the places concerned.