Interaction during mental health floating support home visits: managing host–guest and professional–client identities in home-spaces

Abstract

Mental health work has been transformed by ‘shifting geographies of care’ from institutions to care in communities, in particular by the emergence of support located within home-spaces. This article studies a floating support service targeted at people with mental health problems and contributes to research on post-institution and home care geographies. The data contain 17 audio-recorded home visits conducted by professional care workers. An ethnomethodological analysis informed by geographies of care in home-spaces shows how the home as a material space has consequences for conversations and the relations between the service users and workers. The parties orient to two relational and shifting identity pairs in their ‘home-space talk’: a host–guest pair (social call talk) and a professional–client pair (targeted intervention talk). Professional–client pair dominates, and in this sense floating support produces institutionalization of home-spaces. However, social call talk that enables service users to act as hosts governing their home-spaces has important functions. Orientations to hosts and guests create symmetry and trust among the parties that encourages recovery promoting interaction. The article also demonstrates the applicability of the methods developed in the geographies of mental health and home in the ethnomethodological interaction analysis, and the other way round.

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