Alain Topor
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 328269 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Alain Topor |
| PRENOMES | Alain |
| SOBRENOME | Topor |
| ASSINATURA | TOPOR A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5164-3370 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Wellbeing takes place
Despite growing recognition that wellbeing and recovery are entangled with everyday environments, research in mental health and/or substance use has largely focused on individual experiences or decontextualized indicators, offering limited insights into how social-material conditions of place may enable or constrain recovery processes. This gap calls for empirical studies that explore how wellbeing and recovery are enacted within the contexts of …
Enabling Fuzziness
People’s stories about recovery include interactions with professionals. What happened in these situations? Seven situations were analysed using an abductive approach. Enabling situations seem to be characterised by their fuzziness regarding the place they occur, the time spent, the role of doings and the reciprocal interaction between the participants, resulting in a loss of balance, challenging their sense of self, professional settings and kno…
Something is clashing” – intentions to offer Medication-Free services within a traditional mental health ward
Medication-Free services conflict with traditional medical systems due to fundamental differences in philosophy, structure, power dynamics and focus. Systemic changes are necessary to create a more flexible, empowering and relationship-focused milieu that supports both approaches effectively
Plus 1 Is More Than 2
Having the combination of mental health problems and financial difficulties is strongly associated with increased risk for social exclusion, far beyond the effect of either factor alone
Micropolitics of Mental Health Recovery
Mental health recovery takes place in a social and material world. However, socio-material contexts have often been absent from recovery studies. The present study was conducted in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare country. We interviewed people at meeting places who had experiences as service users, focusing on their experiences of becoming well, and analyzed their recovery stories using an assemblage framework. Our analysis identified four constit…
Living needs a landscape’
The deinstitutionalization of mental health institutions has enabled service users to live in the community and search for what Duff coins 'enabling places.' These places were explored through walking interviews, in which service-users led the way. This analysis revealed features which made places promote liveable lives: places help people explore, places help people stand out, places give people responsibilities, and places dare people. An adver…
A qualitative fallacy
This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and …
You realise you are better when you want to live, want to go out, want to see people
BACKGROUND: The lack of social and material perspectives in descriptions of recovery processes is almost common in recovery research. AIM: Consequently, we investigated recovery stories and how people with mental health and/or addiction challenges included social and material aspects in these stories. METHOD: We conducted focus group and individual interviews. We investigated how the participants narrated their stories and how they assembled plac…
The Lost Social Context of Recovery Psychiatrization of a Social Process
From being a concept questioning the core of psychiatric knowledge and practice, recovery has been adopted as a guiding vison for mental health policy and practice by different local, national, and international organizations. The aim of this article is to contextualize the different understandings of recovery and its psychiatrization through the emergence of an individualizing and de-contextualized definition which have gained a dominant positio…
Diversity, Complexity and Ordinality
In conjunction with the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, social workers have been commissioned to help service users in their daily living in their homes and in the community. The consequences of these changes for experience-based knowledge and practices in their contexts remain relatively unknown. In this study, eighteen service users and the social workers they described as helpful for them were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, t…
Beyond formalized plans
BACKGROUND: User involvement, based on respect and carried out through dialogue, has been shown to lead to increased self-respect, self-confidence and positive identity. In Sweden, the Social Service Act requires that interventions be designed and implemented together with the individual concerned. The basic criterion for social support is prolonged severe mental illness (usually at least 6 months), with no criteria for specific diagnosis or inst…
The Stockholm Follow-up Study of Users Diagnosed with Psychosis (Supp)
Since the 1970s, psychiatric care in the western world has undergone fundamental changes known as de-institutionalisation. This has changed the living conditions for people with severe mental illness. The purpose of this study was to investigate the living conditions and utilisation of care and social services for a group of people in Sweden with diagnosis of psychosis over a 10-year period, 2004-2013. During this period, psychiatric care decreas…
Materialities in supported housing for people with mental health problems
Our daily lives and sense of self are partly formed by material surroundings that are often taken for granted. This materiality is also important for people with mental health problems living in supported housing with surroundings consisting of different healthcare services, neighbourhoods, buildings or furniture. In this study, we explored how understandings of tenants are expressed in the materialities of supported housing. We conducted ethnogr…
Micro-affirmations and Recovery for Persons with Mental Health and Alcohol and Drug Problems
Recurrent factors contributing to a recovery process from co-occurring mental health and addiction problems mentioned by users and professionals have been analyzed as part of working alliances and helpful relationships. Still, we lack knowledge about how helpful relationships are developed in daily practice. In this article, we focus on the concrete construction of professional helpful relationships. Forty persons in recovery and fifteen professi…
Studies regarding supported housing and the built environment for people with mental health problems
Places where people live are important for their personal and social lives. This is also the case for people with mental health problems living in supported housing. To summarise the existing knowledge, we conducted a systematic review of 13 studies with different methodologies regarding the built environment in supported housing and examined their findings in a thematic analysis. The built environment of supported housing involves three importan…
It’s not just a lot of words’. A qualitative exploration of residents’ descriptions of helpful relationships in supportive housing
This article explores how professional relationships may be helpful from the perspective of residents in staffed supportive housing for individuals with severe mental health and/or drug problems. Using in-dept interviews, residents were individually asked to describe a helpful relationship with a self-chosen staff member, the content of the help provided by this staff member and how this help influenced their lives. Using thematic analysis, we fo…
A longitudinal study of men and women diagnosed with psychosis
Small Things, Micro-Affirmations and Helpful Professionals Everyday Recovery-Orientated Practices According to Persons with Mental Health Problems
The aim of this study is to present concrete descriptions of the content in the construction of helpful relationships with staff, according to users. Starting with the re-occurring concept of the meaning of "little things" in recovery studies, a literature review was done. A thematic analysis shows that small things play an important role in improving a person's sense of self. Small things seem to be an invisible but effective parts of a recovery…
A place for the heart
A time-geographic approach for visualizing the paths of intervention for persons with severe mental illness
Living conditions for persons with severe mental illness (SMI) in Sweden have changed dramatically in recent decades, mainly due to the closure of mental hospitals in the 1990s and the subsequent development of community-based interventions. Thereby, people with SMI have experienced care interventions in various forms, which vary according to how the treatment is institutionally organised over the years. There is, however, a lack of knowledge con…
Money, Social Relationships and the Sense of Self
During a 9-month period, 100 persons with SMI were given approx. 73 USD per month above their normal income. Sixteen of the subjects were interviewed. The interviews were analysed according to the methods of thematic analysis. The money was used for personal pleasure and to re-establish reciprocal relations to others. The ways in which different individuals used the money at their disposal impacted their sense of self through experiences of maste…
Money and Mental Illness
After the Asylum? The New Institutional Landscape
Aloneness and loneliness – persons with severe mental illness and experiences of being alone
People with severe mental illness (SMI) are often described as lonely and socially incapable – an inability resulting from the mental illness. The aim of this article is to explore experiences of being alone among persons with SMI. The article is based on interviews with 19 persons diagnosed with psychosis who were interviewed between four and nine times over a period of three years. The findings show that experiences of being alone can be identi…
The components of helping relationships with professionals in psychiatry
BACKGROUND: The quality of the relationship between professional and user is one of the important factors in the recovery process. However, more knowledge is needed concerning the components of helping relationships and characteristics of the helping professional. The aim of this study was to explore users' experiences of helping relationships with professionals. DATA AND METHODS: This was a grounded theory analysis of 71 qualitative interviews t…
The Lost Social Context of Recovery Psychiatrization of a Social Process
From being a concept questioning the core of psychiatric knowledge and practice, recovery has been adopted as a guiding vison for mental health policy and practice by different local, national, and international organizations. The aim of this article is to contextualize the different understandings of recovery and its psychiatrization through the emergence of an individualizing and de-contextualized definition which have gained a dominant positio…
It’s not just a lot of words’. A qualitative exploration of residents’ descriptions of helpful relationships in supportive housing
This article explores how professional relationships may be helpful from the perspective of residents in staffed supportive housing for individuals with severe mental health and/or drug problems. Using in-dept interviews, residents were individually asked to describe a helpful relationship with a self-chosen staff member, the content of the help provided by this staff member and how this help influenced their lives. Using thematic analysis, we fo…
Small Things, Micro-Affirmations and Helpful Professionals Everyday Recovery-Orientated Practices According to Persons with Mental Health Problems
The aim of this study is to present concrete descriptions of the content in the construction of helpful relationships with staff, according to users. Starting with the re-occurring concept of the meaning of "little things" in recovery studies, a literature review was done. A thematic analysis shows that small things play an important role in improving a person's sense of self. Small things seem to be an invisible but effective parts of a recovery…
After the Asylum? The New Institutional Landscape
Money and Mental Illness
Living needs a landscape’
The deinstitutionalization of mental health institutions has enabled service users to live in the community and search for what Duff coins 'enabling places.' These places were explored through walking interviews, in which service-users led the way. This analysis revealed features which made places promote liveable lives: places help people explore, places help people stand out, places give people responsibilities, and places dare people. An adver…
A place for the heart
Money, Social Relationships and the Sense of Self
During a 9-month period, 100 persons with SMI were given approx. 73 USD per month above their normal income. Sixteen of the subjects were interviewed. The interviews were analysed according to the methods of thematic analysis. The money was used for personal pleasure and to re-establish reciprocal relations to others. The ways in which different individuals used the money at their disposal impacted their sense of self through experiences of maste…
A qualitative fallacy
This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and …
Materialities in supported housing for people with mental health problems
Our daily lives and sense of self are partly formed by material surroundings that are often taken for granted. This materiality is also important for people with mental health problems living in supported housing with surroundings consisting of different healthcare services, neighbourhoods, buildings or furniture. In this study, we explored how understandings of tenants are expressed in the materialities of supported housing. We conducted ethnogr…
A time-geographic approach for visualizing the paths of intervention for persons with severe mental illness
Living conditions for persons with severe mental illness (SMI) in Sweden have changed dramatically in recent decades, mainly due to the closure of mental hospitals in the 1990s and the subsequent development of community-based interventions. Thereby, people with SMI have experienced care interventions in various forms, which vary according to how the treatment is institutionally organised over the years. There is, however, a lack of knowledge con…
Micropolitics of Mental Health Recovery
Mental health recovery takes place in a social and material world. However, socio-material contexts have often been absent from recovery studies. The present study was conducted in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare country. We interviewed people at meeting places who had experiences as service users, focusing on their experiences of becoming well, and analyzed their recovery stories using an assemblage framework. Our analysis identified four constit…
The Stockholm Follow-up Study of Users Diagnosed with Psychosis (Supp)
Since the 1970s, psychiatric care in the western world has undergone fundamental changes known as de-institutionalisation. This has changed the living conditions for people with severe mental illness. The purpose of this study was to investigate the living conditions and utilisation of care and social services for a group of people in Sweden with diagnosis of psychosis over a 10-year period, 2004-2013. During this period, psychiatric care decreas…
Aloneness and loneliness – persons with severe mental illness and experiences of being alone
People with severe mental illness (SMI) are often described as lonely and socially incapable – an inability resulting from the mental illness. The aim of this article is to explore experiences of being alone among persons with SMI. The article is based on interviews with 19 persons diagnosed with psychosis who were interviewed between four and nine times over a period of three years. The findings show that experiences of being alone can be identi…
Social Relationships as a Decisive Factor in Recovering From Severe Mental Illness
Background: Recovery research often describes recovery from mental illness as a complex individual process. In this article a social perspective on recovery is developed. Aims: To ascertain which factors people regard as decisive to their own recovery and what makes them beneficial. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with 58 persons in Sweden who had recovered from severe mental illness. Interviews were qualitatively analyzed using groun…
Not Just an Individual Journey
Background: Recent literature on recovery describes the process as deeply personal and unique to each individual. While there are aspects of recovery that are unique to each individual, this article argues that focusing solely on these overlooks the fact that recovery unfolds within a social and interpersonal context. Materials: Drawing from qualitative data, this article describes aspects of recovery that involve the contributions of others, the…
The components of helping relationships with professionals in psychiatry
BACKGROUND: The quality of the relationship between professional and user is one of the important factors in the recovery process. However, more knowledge is needed concerning the components of helping relationships and characteristics of the helping professional. The aim of this study was to explore users' experiences of helping relationships with professionals. DATA AND METHODS: This was a grounded theory analysis of 71 qualitative interviews t…
Aloneness and loneliness – persons with severe mental illness and experiences of being alone
People with severe mental illness (SMI) are often described as lonely and socially incapable – an inability resulting from the mental illness. The aim of this article is to explore experiences of being alone among persons with SMI. The article is based on interviews with 19 persons diagnosed with psychosis who were interviewed between four and nine times over a period of three years. The findings show that experiences of being alone can be identi…
Money and Mental Illness
After the Asylum? The New Institutional Landscape
A place for the heart
A time-geographic approach for visualizing the paths of intervention for persons with severe mental illness
Living conditions for persons with severe mental illness (SMI) in Sweden have changed dramatically in recent decades, mainly due to the closure of mental hospitals in the 1990s and the subsequent development of community-based interventions. Thereby, people with SMI have experienced care interventions in various forms, which vary according to how the treatment is institutionally organised over the years. There is, however, a lack of knowledge con…
Money, Social Relationships and the Sense of Self
During a 9-month period, 100 persons with SMI were given approx. 73 USD per month above their normal income. Sixteen of the subjects were interviewed. The interviews were analysed according to the methods of thematic analysis. The money was used for personal pleasure and to re-establish reciprocal relations to others. The ways in which different individuals used the money at their disposal impacted their sense of self through experiences of maste…
Small Things, Micro-Affirmations and Helpful Professionals Everyday Recovery-Orientated Practices According to Persons with Mental Health Problems
The aim of this study is to present concrete descriptions of the content in the construction of helpful relationships with staff, according to users. Starting with the re-occurring concept of the meaning of "little things" in recovery studies, a literature review was done. A thematic analysis shows that small things play an important role in improving a person's sense of self. Small things seem to be an invisible but effective parts of a recovery…
Micro-affirmations and Recovery for Persons with Mental Health and Alcohol and Drug Problems
Recurrent factors contributing to a recovery process from co-occurring mental health and addiction problems mentioned by users and professionals have been analyzed as part of working alliances and helpful relationships. Still, we lack knowledge about how helpful relationships are developed in daily practice. In this article, we focus on the concrete construction of professional helpful relationships. Forty persons in recovery and fifteen professi…
Studies regarding supported housing and the built environment for people with mental health problems
Places where people live are important for their personal and social lives. This is also the case for people with mental health problems living in supported housing. To summarise the existing knowledge, we conducted a systematic review of 13 studies with different methodologies regarding the built environment in supported housing and examined their findings in a thematic analysis. The built environment of supported housing involves three importan…
It’s not just a lot of words’. A qualitative exploration of residents’ descriptions of helpful relationships in supportive housing
This article explores how professional relationships may be helpful from the perspective of residents in staffed supportive housing for individuals with severe mental health and/or drug problems. Using in-dept interviews, residents were individually asked to describe a helpful relationship with a self-chosen staff member, the content of the help provided by this staff member and how this help influenced their lives. Using thematic analysis, we fo…
A longitudinal study of men and women diagnosed with psychosis
Beyond formalized plans
BACKGROUND: User involvement, based on respect and carried out through dialogue, has been shown to lead to increased self-respect, self-confidence and positive identity. In Sweden, the Social Service Act requires that interventions be designed and implemented together with the individual concerned. The basic criterion for social support is prolonged severe mental illness (usually at least 6 months), with no criteria for specific diagnosis or inst…
The Stockholm Follow-up Study of Users Diagnosed with Psychosis (Supp)
Since the 1970s, psychiatric care in the western world has undergone fundamental changes known as de-institutionalisation. This has changed the living conditions for people with severe mental illness. The purpose of this study was to investigate the living conditions and utilisation of care and social services for a group of people in Sweden with diagnosis of psychosis over a 10-year period, 2004-2013. During this period, psychiatric care decreas…
Materialities in supported housing for people with mental health problems
Our daily lives and sense of self are partly formed by material surroundings that are often taken for granted. This materiality is also important for people with mental health problems living in supported housing with surroundings consisting of different healthcare services, neighbourhoods, buildings or furniture. In this study, we explored how understandings of tenants are expressed in the materialities of supported housing. We conducted ethnogr…
Diversity, Complexity and Ordinality
In conjunction with the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, social workers have been commissioned to help service users in their daily living in their homes and in the community. The consequences of these changes for experience-based knowledge and practices in their contexts remain relatively unknown. In this study, eighteen service users and the social workers they described as helpful for them were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, t…
You realise you are better when you want to live, want to go out, want to see people
BACKGROUND: The lack of social and material perspectives in descriptions of recovery processes is almost common in recovery research. AIM: Consequently, we investigated recovery stories and how people with mental health and/or addiction challenges included social and material aspects in these stories. METHOD: We conducted focus group and individual interviews. We investigated how the participants narrated their stories and how they assembled plac…
The Lost Social Context of Recovery Psychiatrization of a Social Process
From being a concept questioning the core of psychiatric knowledge and practice, recovery has been adopted as a guiding vison for mental health policy and practice by different local, national, and international organizations. The aim of this article is to contextualize the different understandings of recovery and its psychiatrization through the emergence of an individualizing and de-contextualized definition which have gained a dominant positio…
Living needs a landscape’
The deinstitutionalization of mental health institutions has enabled service users to live in the community and search for what Duff coins 'enabling places.' These places were explored through walking interviews, in which service-users led the way. This analysis revealed features which made places promote liveable lives: places help people explore, places help people stand out, places give people responsibilities, and places dare people. An adver…
A qualitative fallacy
This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and …
Plus 1 Is More Than 2
Having the combination of mental health problems and financial difficulties is strongly associated with increased risk for social exclusion, far beyond the effect of either factor alone
Micropolitics of Mental Health Recovery
Mental health recovery takes place in a social and material world. However, socio-material contexts have often been absent from recovery studies. The present study was conducted in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare country. We interviewed people at meeting places who had experiences as service users, focusing on their experiences of becoming well, and analyzed their recovery stories using an assemblage framework. Our analysis identified four constit…
Wellbeing takes place
Despite growing recognition that wellbeing and recovery are entangled with everyday environments, research in mental health and/or substance use has largely focused on individual experiences or decontextualized indicators, offering limited insights into how social-material conditions of place may enable or constrain recovery processes. This gap calls for empirical studies that explore how wellbeing and recovery are enacted within the contexts of …
Psychology (23 obras) · Mental health (21 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Mental Health and Patient Involvement (19 obras) · Qualitative research (14 obras) · Psychiatry (12 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Medicine (11 obras) · Social science (11 obras) · Political science (9 obras)