Scaling-up the gifts of care: mental health advocacy movement in Latvia and beyond

According to Mary Douglas (1990), gifts essentially contribute to solidarity. Such nonmaterial
gifts as volunteering for a good cause or organization and providing care to more vulnerable
members of community or society, no doubt, can also be regarded as acts of solidarity. The
degree of directness of solidarity acts varies with the social distance: from giving to charity to
doing work for an NGO, to caring for friends or family members (Komter 2005). More often
than not, ways of caring evolve in stages, from commitment to the loved ones to forming a
patients’ association or advocacy organization, to advancing policy initiatives on the part of a
larger community of sufferers from a particular illness or disability. In this paper it is intended
to discuss tendencies in Latvia’s psychiatric patient advocacy movement of the recent decade.
The data analysed stem from a series of interviews with stakeholders in the field of mental
health care, both from governmental and non-governmental sector, as well as participant observation in two self-help groups. It will be argued that gift giving for the sake of mental health patients’ wellbeing to a large degree depends on the caregivers and/or NGO workers’ social and cultural capital (including its transnational forms) that, in turn, has a potential to be converted into actual acts of solidarity.