Conference Agenda

Experiences of chronic illness frequently involve a profound disruption of trust: trust in the body, medical knowledge, care systems, and one’s capacity to orient toward the future. In contexts marked by medical uncertainty, fragmented care, and proliferating information and misinformation, this disruption generates ambivalent movements between trust, mistrust, and distrust. While mistrust may function as an adaptive psychic response to inconsistency or therapeutic failure, its uncontained escalation can become corrosive, undermining agency, relationality, and continuity of self.

This paper offers a psychosocial contribution to debates on trust by drawing on a situated clinical–investigative experience developed within Chronnect, a mental health initiative working with people living with chronic conditions. Rather than presenting a prescriptive technique, the paper reflects on the RE Model as a clinical framework for understanding how trust is reconfigured following biographical rupture. The model outlines six interrelated processes: re-signifying experience, re-valuing uncertainty, re-inhabiting the body, re-constructing identity, regulating affect, and restoring situated agency; through which patients and clinicians work with uncertainty without resorting to premature certainty or idealized medical authority.

Conceptually, the paper differentiates mistrust as a critical stance from distrust as a collapse of relational space. Clinically, it explores how therapeutic work can hold skepticism, doubt, and not-knowing as meaningful psychic positions. By foregrounding lived experience alongside biomedical knowledge, the model supports a form of trust that is conditional, reflexive, and capable of bearing instability.

Addressing the conference theme, the paper examines how trust and mistrust operate dialectically in chronic illness, proposing that the psychosocial task is not restoring stable truths but creating relational conditions in which uncertainty and not-knowing can be lived without collapsing into distrust or powerlessness.

This paper turns to the work of Fernand Deligny and his experiments with young autistic people in the Cévennes. Rejecting the dominant institutional practices of lifelong confinement and psychiatry’s insistence that whatever exceeded its understanding was “incurable, unbearable, unlivable,” Deligny and his collaborators cultivated an approach grounded in a radical ethics, curiosity, and a trust in the not-yet-known. The noted practice of drawing wanderlines - mapping the movements of the young people - became a way for adults to shift from diagnosing and interpreting “problematic” behaviours toward a mode of attentive observation and active abstention.

In a contemporary landscape where the possibility of care within institutional frameworks has been steadily eroded by a reliance on predetermined outcomes, economic logics, and a pervasive culture of risk aversion, this paper asks what Deligny’s practice might offer us. How might it expand our capacity to remain with uncertainty, distress, and discomfort, and to rethink what forms of trust become possible when we resist audit-driven demands for certainty and control.

Rachel Wilson is a practice-based researcher working in mental health accommodation services. Rachel is conducting her doctoral studies in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and is an Associate Lecturer in the Centre for Academic Language and Literacy. Her research integrates practical and theoretical approaches intersecting group psychotherapy, Institutional Analysis, filmmaking, and podcasting to address the conditions of enunciation in mental health instituting. She is a member of the CHASE Mental Health and Social Justice Network and a member of TIAN—Transversal Institutional Analysis Network.

This paper draws from support work I did with a client, R*, read through the thought of Fernand Deligny and Felix Guattari. R is a DJ who, when I worked with him, had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and was living in a high support needs mental health accomodation service. R does not have normative access to language. Instead, he makes mixtapes. Each tape is an aural picture the narrates how he experienced the world that the time of recording. These tapes were then distributed to places he frequented in the area, creating an cartography of mixtapes. R eventuatally made his mixtapes more public and recorded at least one record as well as DJed and was interviewed for a pod cast produced by the service providing charity.

The paper will stretch Fernand Deligny's visual cartographic practice to the aural to understand how Deligny's "wander lines" can be created by sound and material objects (the mixtapes). It will use this to analyse the way in which R created a metamodle (to borrow Guattari's term) that sat over top London, creating an "other" geography and a differnt way for us to navigate the city.

*All content shared from my work is done with R's express permission.