"Get organized, because we will need all our strength". Social movements as places of resistance: a collective explorative inquiry about critical mental health practices in Europe

Historically, mental health has been a topic discussed and analysed from a political perspective, especially within the contexts of Critical Psychology and Psychology of Liberation. There is a vast literature in Psychology and Psychiatry that highlights the relations between mental health and socio-political issues such as marginalization, class struggles, housing crisis, unemployment rates, and discrimination based on gender, race, and class. Also, in clinical settings -inside and outside healthcare institutions- psychologists reflect on the limits of a biomedical approach. In particular, social movements have contributed to creating social clinics and mutual aid groups to respond to marginalized populations' needs in a non-formal context. Furthermore, starting from their clinical experiences, they try to lay the foundation for a critique of current economic and social health policies. Despite the knowledge that it is fundamental to integrate a political lens into the clinical discourses, Academic research in mental health seems to favour researches that focus only on a biomedical approach to mental health instead of deconstructing some biased views that psychologists and psychiatrists’ communities have on psychological sufferance. For this reason, the current work aims to explore the reflections about clinical practices that arise in formal and non-formal contexts, viewed from an academic perspective. Through qualitative interviews involving 10 European professors and researchers in the field of human sciences, this research deepens the connections between theory and practices in critical psychology, analysing the meaning of political mental health and questioning the role of communities in developing practices to respond to people’s needs. Furthermore, it collects reflections on the evolution of research in mental health and the difficulties encountered by social movements working on psycho-social support to be recognized as stakeholders in the academic debate.