‘Holding it all together and falling apart’: the structural invisibility of women as informal carers for young adults with mental ill health – implications for critical social work practice

This article draws on a feminist heuristic inquiry to examine the lived experiences of eight women providing informal care to young adults with mental ill health in England. Employing semi-structured interviews within researcher-developed ‘thinking nurture spaces’, alongside autoethnographic data from the researcher as a ninth co-inquirer, the article exposes four empirical themes: connection as a conditional and often absent resource; systemic professional invisibility, including the consistent failure to enact statutory rights under the Care Act 2014 in England; the sustained emotional and physiological toll of care, including secondary trauma, deferred psychological collapse and the entrapment created by the threat of self-harm; and the complex, non-linear renegotiation of identity over time. The analysis introduces ‘stratinterpression’, the process by which gendered structural inequalities are internalised and reproduced at the level of selfhood, and concludes with specific implications for critical social work practice, including the discharge of statutory duties, relational engagement and structural advocacy.