When Young Adulthood Presents a Double Challenge: Mental Illness, Disconnected Activities and Relational Agency

The chapter revolves around the challenges of young adulthood when living with severe mental illness. First of all, it addresses the difficulties inherent in a mainstream comprehension of mental illness and how problems are often individualized, giving little leeway for developmental processes to unfold. Hence, an alternative conceptualization is proposed and discussed in relation to working with young adults in the frame of a social-psychiatric institutional setting. Secondly, concrete examples are discussed of how to support developmental processes through a) an exploration of motives, and b) the building of relational agency.
The ambition of this chapter is thus to explore how to simultaneously work to treat mental illness and to build general life competences for mastering young adulthood. I will argue that the concepts of disconnecting activities and relational agency can contribute productively to our understanding of what matters to the young adults (as questions of motives and meaningfulness) – and ultimately of how to co-construct meaningfulness in psychosocial work (and why this may prove very fruitful).

Key words: young adulthood, mental illness, relational agency, social-psychiatry, disconnecting activities, psychosocial work