Competing Responsibilities and the Ethics of Care in Young People’s Engagements with Digital Mental Health

Abstract

Widespread campaigns for optimising digital healthcare generally focus on promoting patient responsibilisation or self-responsibility, emphasising the need for encouraging the development of ‘informed patients’ who draw on digital resources as part of self-care strategies. Arguably, however, while ‘self-care’ often involves the promotion of patient self-responsibility, it simultaneously foregrounds other modes of ethical engagement, such as care for, or from, (known and unknown) others and concerns over states’ and corporations’ responsibilities for ensuring mental wellbeing. The broader literature on responsibility suggests that rather than unilaterally privileging personal responsibility, advanced liberal societies create a much more fertile and contested ground upon which multiple, ‘competing responsibilities’ flourish. Digital technologies add unique facets to how responsibility is enacted, reshaping experiences of time and space by enabling new forms of seemingly continuous, person-person and person-technology relations and consequently refracting users’ sense of where agency lies (i.e. in themselves, in their relations with [human] others, or in technologies themselves). Drawing on a case study of young New Zealanders’ uses of digital technology for promoting mental health, this chapter examines how a newly emerging ethics of care recasts understandings and enactments of responsibility for mental wellbeing.