“Being Able to Shape My Home”: Empirical Accounts of Responsive Residential Environments in Recovery

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Processes of mental health recovery are deeply entangled with the everyday environments in which people live. Drawing on qualitative interviews and Photovoice activities with residents experiencing mental illness in rural and small-town Lower Austria, this article examines how residential settings can act as responsive environments—spaces that answer meaningfully to residents’ actions, needs, and preferences. Based on participants’ residential biographies, three interrelated categories are identified through which responsiveness is experienced: material (the physical affordances and modifiability of dwellings), relational (the availability and quality of proximal social relationships), and systemic (the institutional, infrastructural, and regulatory conditions shaping everyday life). Findings show that the possibility to influence and personalize one's immediate living space is perceived as a central source of self-efficacy and emotional stability, particularly when contrasting living on one's own with more restrictive institutional housing arrangements. At the same time, living on one’s own entails ambivalences: while autonomy and control support wellbeing, limited contact with others and constrained mobility—common in rural settings—can intensify loneliness and inhibit recovery. The analysis shows that autonomy is not simply an individual condition but is relationally constituted, depending on supportive social arrangements that enable residents to sustain routines and act meaningfully. In this sense, the distinction between living on one’s own and living alone emerges as a difference in configurations of environmental responsiveness rather than a simple opposition between independence and isolation. By conceptualizing responsive residential environments as relationally and systemically produced rather than solely materially defined, the article specifies how environments respond to residents’ practices across material, relational, and systemic categories, foregrounding the socio-spatial conditions that sustain or undermine recovery. These insights highlight the need for housing and support models that integrate personal autonomy, meaningful social connectedness, and accessible regional infrastructures, especially in post-institutional and rural contexts.