“Come un’oasi protetta”. Discorsi e pratiche della riabilitazione nelle reti di salute mentale di comunità

This article revisits a set of ethnographic experiences conducted in different contexts of community psychiatry, offering an interpretive lens on the processes that underpin the practice of “doing mental health” through networks. These experiences reveal how social practices are shaped by performative discourses, marked by a shared semantics and grounded in terms drawn from the “universal” vocabulary of rehabilitation. Through these practices, classificatory systems and categories are sedimented—along with partial and often limiting representations of community mental health networks. One possible consequence of such dynamics is the formulation of standardized rehabilitation plans which, though designed to create opportunities, remain disconnected from the lived worlds of their recipients, triggering processes of rupture. Overcoming these tensions calls for an approach capable of investigating and valuing the processual and generative nature of the contexts in which practices and discourses are enacted.