The Elusive Image and the Missing Subject: A Hauntological Approach to Coproduction in Mental Health Research

Cult Med Psychiatry. 2025 Jun 10. doi: 10.1007/s11013-025-09917-4. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The growing inclusion of people with lived experience and their carers in mental health research begs us to consider how their lived experience influences research. In this commentary, I use photographs to show how I used my personal experience of caring in creative ways to research violence against people with mental illness in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Drawing on Byron Good’s use of hauntology and my personal experience, I argue for its adaptation as a framework for both analysis and visual representation using a multilayered auto-visual-ethnographic engagement centered around the local Amtrak station. I elaborate how in the basal layer the photographs stem from the interplay of mental images and ethnographic encounters to explore my subjectivity and intersubjective relations. In the second layer, I use an archival map to tie the photographs to the wider historical context of North Dakota. By doing so, I show how the Amtrak station emerges as a site for chaotic personal narratives and contested histories. In conclusion, I address this method’s departure from classical photo-ethnography, arguing that such a hauntologically informed auto-visual-ethnographic engagement could help researchers incorporate their experiences of care and loss in mental health research in meaningful, creative, and sensitive ways.

PMID:40495040 | DOI:10.1007/s11013-025-09917-4