Mental health service user territories: Enacting 'safe spaces' in the community

This article develops a conceptualization of 'space' that enables in-depth analysis of mental health service user 'territories'. Driven by the aim to understand how spaces within the framework of 'community care' are produced, an approach that draws upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'territoriality' is developed. Through this we see how important it can be for service users to produce 'safe spaces' that enable forms of 'normalized' activities to be produced, but, crucially, in settings that exist outside completely mainstream settings. Analysing drop-in day centres and home environments (two key sites in community care), the article demonstrates the value of a micro-analysis of the production of space to understanding some of the ways service user experience operates in a spatially distributed sense. This helps to illuminate the impact on identity of existing within 'community care'.