1. Introduction
A growing body of research suggests a positive link between access to green (relating to natural features dominated by land/vegetation) and blue (relating to natural features dominated by water/wetland) spaces and mental health (Greenspace Scotland 2018). Most studies of this phenomenon are quantitative—including statistical approaches that suggest significant improvements in several mental health outcomes (e.g., Bowen et al. Reference Bowen, Neill and Crisp2016), and/or review papers focused broadly on health and wellbeing (e.g., Lee and Maheswaran Reference Lee and Maheswaran2010). This same body of literature notes difficulty in determining why engaging with green/blue spaces might improve mental health, due to challenges in standardizing measures and quantifying benefits (Lee and Maheswaran Reference Lee and Maheswaran2010). Over-reliance on clinical and quantitative methodologies contributes to a lack of creativity and expansiveness in exploring the mental health benefits of engaging with green/blue spaces, the radical potential in/of these actions, and related challenges, including access and support. More critical approaches can broaden thinking about causality, encompassing the ways praxis, care, and embodiment are entangled with subjective experiences of “improving” mental health.
This paper draws from a study investigating the use of green/blue space activities by community groups for mental health improvement in Scotland. We specifically explore wild swimming (swimming in natural bodies of water rather than man-made pools) groups as ecologies of care that encompass a number of intersecting and complex practices. Code (Reference Code2008) highlights the value of ecological thinking in exploring the complexities and mutual constitution of “the human and other-than-human world” (188). Ecologies of care intentionally encompass ideas about the mutual relationships between humans and nature, as well as (in our study, related) human communities of care (e.g., Care Ecologies Group et al. Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022). Ecofeminist approaches to care have emphasized the interdependence of ecosystem destruction and devaluing of “feminized” ways of relating and existing within mind/body/culture/nature dichotomies that uphold masculinist domination of the earth and its inhabitants (Serafini Reference Serafini2021; Ojeda et al. Reference Ojeda, Nirmal, Rocheleau and Emel2022). Practices of care, and exploring mental health through subjective experience, fall within this paradigm of devalued ways of being and knowing. With attention to this context, we explore the possibilities for and realities of mutual care integral to the wild swimming groups with which we worked. Our focus on wild swimming groups as ecologies of care thus speaks to some of the complex and subtle-yet-profound benefits of engaging with nature for mental wellbeing. In emphasizing mutuality, wild swimming groups can be thought of as “emergent ecologies” (Ojeda et al. Reference Ojeda, Nirmal, Rocheleau and Emel2022) with profound potential for rehearsing joyful and sustainable ways of resisting/living beyond capitalist logics (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022).
Of particular concern when exploring wild swimming groups are issues of access, which can limit who comprises these groups. Wolch et al. (Reference Wolch, Byrne and Newell2014) note in their review of urban green spaces in the United States that access is more readily available to communities that are predominantly White and/or socioeconomically advantaged. In Scotland, while most of the population live in urban areas, many have close access to natural spaces, especially as the majority of Scotland’s land mass is rural. The geographical proximity of extra-urban spaces provides an opportunity for consideration of who accesses green/blue spaces, including whether those with more severe mental health challenges are utilizing green/blue spaces therapeutically, as well as socioeconomically diverse, racialized, and disabled communities. For the purposes of this paper, a focus on disability and access came through as of particular importance.
Corazon et al. (Reference Corazon, Gramkow, Poulsen, Lygum, Zhang and Karlsson Stigsdotter2019) note that studies consistently find that physically disabled peopleFootnote 1 access green spaces at a lower rate than those without physical disabilities, while simultaneously highlighting that the higher incidence of mental health conditions among physically disabled people might indicate a greater need for participation in these spaces and related activities. Challenges around physical accessibility to nature compound issues around mental health and access, highlighting intersectional implications for nature engagement. Recent works by Darcy et al. (Reference Darcy, Maxwell, Edwards and Almond2023) and Job et al. (Reference Job, Heales and Obst2022) highlight the potential for community-based approaches to widening accessibility of blue spaces for disabled people; more broadly, disability scholars have highlighted the imperative of local, community-based care to both surviving and thriving through solidarity, while attending to place and embodiment (e.g., Chandler and Rice Reference Chandler and Rice2013; Hall and McGarrol Reference Hall and McGarrol2013; Nishida Reference Nishida2022).
Burlingham et al. (Reference Burlingham, Denton, Massey, Vides and Mark Harper2022) found positive impacts on the mental wellbeing of people with depression and anxiety in a study on sea swimming. They note that groups developed a “sense of community” (8), and emphasize the adventurous aspects of sea swimming as contributing to participants’ enjoyment and benefits from the course. However, as highlighted by Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022), “writings on swimming have tended towards a biopolitics of individualistic human health, [and] a transcendence of situatedness and natureculture” (29). Similarly, Boodman (Reference Boodman2023) has warned of the potential coexistence of care and violence in the colonial legacies implicit in individualized healthcare models. Indigenous-led work, centering the interconnected nature of human unliveability and broader ecological harms of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism, similarly emphasizes the insufficiency of individualized approaches to mental health care (Zantingh et al. Reference Zantingh, Hey, Ansloos, Dueck and Sundararajan2024). These critiques further suggest that reliance on green/blue prescribing approaches may reinscribe colonial logics in biomedical framings of mental health, narrowing environmental and place-based factors to fit within mental health services (Josewski et al. Reference Josewski, de Leeuw and Greenwood2023). In this paper, we seek instead to situate the physical and embodied nature of wild swimming for mental health improvement within material, spatial, and experiential contexts, to develop an understanding of the ecologies of care that emerge within wild swimming groups, beyond blue health prescribing as part of statutory mental health services. As the Care Ecologies Group et al. (Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022) put it: “in the arts and humanities, ‘ecology’ is an evocative metaphor for thinking about practices and experiences of care. Paraphrasing artist Francesco Salvini (Reference Salvini2019), ecologies are assembled by juxtaposing fragments that interact with one another, including concepts, materialities, relations and experiences” (251). This approach is further informed by Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022), who highlight “new feminist materialist and posthumanist framings of justice-to-come” (28) as useful for rethinking research methods and analysis in ways that broaden perspectives—in this case, how we conceive of mental health “care”—and the complicated “why” and “how” of the role that may be played by green/blue spaces.
We center the specific experiences of two wild swimming groups and the ways members interact with swimming spots, one another, and their own bodies within the context of these physical and group spaces, an approach emphasizing materiality and space. In work on the materiality of psychiatric spaces, von Peter (Reference Von Peter2013) notes that “patients’ bodies are ‘unruly’ … and thus far from … passive or immobile objects to treat. Similarly … materiality escapes its static qualities, instead developing into something more dynamic and subject to change” (323–24). This dynamism is perhaps even more important outside the confines of clinical spaces (such as the ones in von Peter’s paper) when thinking about relational processes occurring between a “natural” environment and humans. Larsen et al. (Reference Larsen, Bøe and Topor2020) encourage thinking about relationships between humans, materials, and environments: “skills of humans are in fundamental ways embedded in, and emerge from, interplay with material environments” (1) and further, “the relationship between humans and materiality should be read as a blending” (2). This approach is particularly useful in exploring the “skill” of swimming, humans’ understandings of the ways nature impacts them, how the material world is significant to people and groups, and thus what forms of ecologies of care, emerging from and “blending” these relationships, might take.
Laws (Reference Laws2009) integrates the concept of “topophilia, (literally, love of place—see Tuan Reference Tuan1974)” (1828) into their important reconceptualization of therapeutic landscapes. This work follows the actions of “psychiatric survivor[s]” (1827) in creating their own therapeutic group, situated within “deviant” spaces, outside of the physical boundaries of clinical mental health. Laws’s work challenges institutionalized, confined versions of therapy—creating room to consider other forms of “therapy” beyond standardized statutory processes. Laws (Reference Laws2009) “embraces the therapeutic landscapes method (as an attentiveness to the healing qualities of place) to explore how a spatial reading of the survivor group provides a more nuanced understanding … [and] … that ‘therapy’ might best be equated with what is comforting or comfortable” (1827–28). Laws’s work goes beyond a singular focus on materiality to consider entanglements and relationships between emotions, identities, and spaces/places, constituting non-clinical spaces as therapeutic while simultaneously distinguishing them from the clinic. Likewise, some of the participants in our study had experiences of more “traditional” forms of therapy, and drew out the benefits of wild swimming as distinct and more impactful than these therapeutic formats.
Following Laws (Reference Laws2009), we explore place-specific “therapeutic landscapes” that go beyond the therapist’s room and explore comfort as therapy. This attention to spatiality, as Laws highlights, enables nuanced engagements with different individuals’ and groups’ experiences with their mental health, including but not limited to statutory services. This is embedded within broader policy contexts that may make certain places more or less welcoming of alternative approaches to care. For example, work by Hall and McGarrol (Reference Hall and McGarrol2013) highlights the Scottish Government’s emphasis on “localism” in disability policy, which the authors argue may “see places as active agents in reimagining how care and wider society can be shaped” (690). We extend this focus to also touch on temporality, particularly exploring prophylacticFootnote 2 impacts of wild swimming for some participants, enabling a feeling of comfort to emerge in advance of any perceived negative emotional experiences. Rather than focusing on mental health care as something we engage with when we experience a deficit, these stories highlight that even those “without mental health problems” can improve their mental health through engagement in what might be considered “therapeutic” landscapes. Returning to Laws’s expansive definition of “therapy” as comforting, our participants too expanded the idea of “comfort,” highlighting a range of sensory, emotional, and embodied experiences as entangled in their wild swimming practice. Of critical importance was the location of these within the group setting, echoing Laws’s participants, who “imagined recovery to not take place in the consulting room but in this world—by collective action, by activism and outreach” (Reference Laws2009, 1830). This begins to unpick the radical potential of these groups and the importance of the complex interplay between individuality and community, forming the unique ecologies of care we experienced working with wild swimming communities.
2. Methods
Existing work on the relationship between green/blue spaces and mental health, particularly those that focus on specific outcome measures, can fail to engage meaningfully with people’s sense-making about their participation in these spaces and related mental health effects. Alternatively, in-depth qualitative methodologies enable exploration of complexity, including nuanced, embodied, and sensory experiences of individual agency, communities of care, and material mental health impacts. The findings presented in this paper are drawn from a multi-method pilot project exploring community groups’ and policymakers’ perceptions of green/blue space use for mental health improvement. Ethical approval was provided by the authors’ home institution. All names of people and organizations are pseudonyms.
In this paper, we analyze two focus groups conducted with community groups in Scotland that undertake wild swimming. Improvement of participants’ mental health was a specific remit of each group. Focus groups enable researchers to gain insight into the perspectives of collectives (Tritter and Landstad Reference Tritter, Landstad, Pope and Mays2020). In this case, the focus group method facilitated discussions around the utility of blue space activities for mental health, as well as gathering concerns, ideas, and challenges faced by the groups. Since the swimming groups were already established, this method was particularly effective in stimulating discussions around group memories, rituals, and in enabling interplay between individual members and stories.
For both focus groups, leaders—in the form of organization staff (for the group we are calling “Turquoise Hearts”) and swim coordinators (for the group we are calling “Freshwater Wanderers”)—facilitated recruitment. The project focused on two different areas of Scotland; one wild swimming focus group was conducted in each area. The two researchers were also invited to participate in swims with both groups, which we did directly before each focus group session. This enabled us to “experience the affective and tactile experience of being in/with the sea [and the loch] and its shifting moods” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 31). Participants indicated that swimming “with” them was important to our ability to understand their experiences better, informing our decision to join in. Being in solidarity with groups, attending to embodied and emotional practices of being-together, and flattening research hierarchies, are parts of the feminist philosophy that informed and emerged from this work (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022). It quite literally “broke the ice”—everyone in swimming costumes, shivering, imbuing the research encounter with laughter, fun, joy, and informality from the start; we noted that this seemed to generate a positive emotional response from participants, demystifying the focus group and settling nerves. Later, we provide further reflections of the swims we participated in, to situate the research and provide details that enable our analysis of issues such as safety, embodiment, and sensory impacts of swimming, which we suggest characterize wild swimming groups as ecologies of care.
Working with existing organizations, taking time to get to know leaders and members, and participating in swims with both groups enabled us to take a “slower” approach to this research. Shefer and Bozalek emphasize slow research as integral to producing scholarship that resists authoritative knowledge as that which “eras[es] bodies and affect” (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 31). Slow methods have particular implications for research on wild swimming, highlighting their potentiality for “disrupting dualisms through engaging in alternative and ethical ways of being/becoming, doing and knowing … with others … and with the environment” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 31–32). Importantly, this approach to research enables engagement with the community spirit of such groups. Laws highlights this approach as one “which gives space to people to explore their own understandings of place … a research that waits and listens” (Reference Laws2009, 1832).
The first focus group (Turquoise Hearts) was with a more formal, referral-based organization supporting people with a range of long-term mental health conditions. The three participants in the focus group form the core group of wild swimmers at this organization, swimming regularly in the sea. The three group members also have a range of physical disabilities, and their swims are facilitated by a swim coach. In addition to the three swimmers, the organization’s leader participated in the conversation.
The second focus group (Freshwater Wanderers) was with a group participating in mental health swims in a freshwater loch. The five participants in this focus group are regular swimmers, though the group is open to others and has had many members over its history. The coordinators of this group are also members, and their coordination/facilitation role is more informal and consists primarily of organizing swims and safety precautions such as timing swims.Footnote 3
The differences between the groups enabled an exploration of the differences and synergies between different formats of therapeutic swimming groups, approaches to wild swimming for mental health improvement, and different-but-similar ways in which practices of care can manifest.
Focus groups were conducted by both researchers, with the second author facilitating discussions; the first author supported and took detailed notes. A question guide was developed prior to the focus groups through engagement with existing literature on community practices of care and benefits of green/blue spaces to mental health, but in-situ discussions evolved based on group stories and conversations. Focus groups were transcribed by a professional transcription company, then reviewed and pseudonymized by both authors (with reference to notes taken by the first author).
We undertook an abductive approach to analysis, emphasizing “surprises” in data to develop “novel theoretical insights that reframe empirical findings in contrast to existing theories” (Timmermans and Tavory Reference Timmermans and Tavory2012, 174). This is undertaken “through iterative dialogue … between data and … existing and new conceptualizations” (Timmermans and Tavory Reference Timmermans and Tavory2012, 180). In this case, our analysis moves beyond the existing research from “psy” disciplines about why and how activities such as wild swimming may improve mental health, to explore intersections with other approaches, including those from geography and feminist and disability studies. Taking “surprising” aspects of the data as our starting point, we conducted two rounds of coding using NVivo software. This more formal coding occurred as one part of the (ongoing) dialogical processes central to abductive analysis (Rinehart Reference Rinehart2021) between the authors, our data (in the form of transcripts, audio recordings, notes, and photographs), and existing research and writings, as well as our experiences wild swimming with participants, which further contributed to our immersion in the data.
3. Experiencing wild swimming
Sitting bare-footed on a blue-sky-and-sun-drenched beach felt like a small miracle on the late Scottish summer day of the Turquoise Hearts focus group. As we reflected on the heaviness of our usual work researching suicide, we felt the importance of noticing and cultivating joy where possible. Waiting for the other swimmers to arrive, noticing the shifts in our emotions intermingling with the practicalities of fieldwork, we enacted one form of slow scholarship, “in that dualisms such as mind/body … thinking/affect become difficult to hold onto in the embodied immersion in living expanses of water such as the ocean” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 31–32). Looking out at the sea, we experienced feelings of guilt at finding joy and fun in the working day, a form of embodied deviance that responded to “the dominant masculinist and colonialist logics of academia” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 39) that limit how we do and feel research.
We were welcomed warmly by the group, teased about our preparedness for the sea. Sarah is a regular wild swimmer; Emily is newer to wild swimming as regular practice but had joined this group to swim previously, during study recruitment. We all walked down the beach, negotiating a chilly entrance to the sea. Cold salt water crept slowly up our bodies, treading water and shivering despite the sunlight. We debated putting our heads under—eventually deciding to take the plunge and submerge. Bracing, vivid, pungent sea water poured down our heads and necks as we emerged, agreeing that this was where real refreshment was to be found. At the end of the session, the group joined hands in a “ring ‘round the rosy” for the missing member, Isla, who could not join in the swim due to an injury—this was her ritual, and the group did it in her honor. After a warm meal with others from Turquoise Hearts, we conducted the focus group indoors at one of the organization’s regular locations.
Another shockingly beautiful day accompanied the Freshwater Wanderers focus group later in the year, though a gathering of dark clouds hovered to one side of the horizon. The loch stretched out ahead, a family of ducks loudly traversing its surface. The group, with whom Sarah had swum once before, navigated the slight incline of the shoreline, then stepped into the cold loch, water shoes slipping over mossy stones. Putting our heads under was no question this time—the water similarly chilling to the sea, but with the bright, nourishing quality of freshwater. It was evening this time, and the greying sky reflected the temperature of the loch and emphasized the rurality of the area—water stretching into wooded countryside and beyond, deepening quickly as we moved away from the bank, until we could no longer stand. It felt like too soon it was time to get out, exiting the clear depths of the water, and we headed back up the bank to blankets and snacks, for another laughter-filled focus group discussion, looking out over the water as darkness slowly crept in.
The wild swimming focus groups were so filled with joy that upon reflection they feel jarring as research praxis. Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) suggest swimming “as a way of refusing everyday practices of the academy that assume or insist on disembodied, disaffect/ive/ed … extractive scholarship, ignoring and erasing relationality and response-ability” (37). Turning down the offer to join in the swims would have been to the detriment of the research encounter; the solidarity built in the freezing plunges immediately ingratiated us with the groups, like a mini-initiation. (Though we acknowledge that being able to participate is also a manifestation of our own multiple privileges, including: having jobs that enable this type of work, being physically and mentally able to participate at the given place and time, having access to transport to get to the spaces, especially the remote loch.) Our participation, and the sense of “response-ability” (Care Ecologies Group et al. Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022; Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) that the swim embodied, enabled us to deeply consider our interactions with the swimmers, blurring researcher-participant lines and responding to the invitation the wild swimmers put before us.
Participating in the embodied experience of wild swimming with the groups was one small way in which we were able to reconfigure our research practice—enabling a sensory, embodied connection to the focus group participants to emerge—becoming part of the keeping-safe and experience the group provides, such as holding one another afloat during the “ring ‘round the rosy”’ ritual. These were small moments of bonding and large ripples of joy that impacted the focus group participants and our practice, altering our thinking about the role of participation and affect in mental health research, contributing in a small way to ever-evolving approaches to justice-to-come scholarship (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) and mental health research more broadly. These encounters fundamentally changed our perspective on the possibilities for joy in mental health research, “producing a ‘hiccup’—a pause, a disruption, a thoughtful, carefull resetting—in everyday habits of scholarship” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 40).
4. Focus group discussions—wild swimming groups as ecologies of care
Focus group discussions enabled exploration of a number of key themes that inform our theorization of wild swimming groups as ecologies of care. These themes are entangled with a consideration of the relationships that constitute these ecologies: between the individuals that make up the groups, and the groups and bodies of water. In this section, we discuss how these themes elucidate the separate but intra-related facets that make up this ecological approach to mental health scholarship.
4.1 Challenging normative relationships between bodies and landscapes
In discussing physical spaces appropriated by the survivor group in their fieldwork, Laws highlights that the stigmatized spaces they chose are “landscapes of counterculture and deviance” (Reference Laws2009, 1830). Scenic sea and loch-side landscapes might not at first glance seem to connect to this sense of deviant spaces, however when taken in relation to the bodies of the swimmers, as well as the temporal variability in weather experienced by year-round swimmers in Scotland, we can see some aspects of the groups’ engagement in these spaces as connected to concepts of counterculture and deviance. This type of alternative engagement enables “alterity in/of happiness” defined by communities with “deviant” social identities, rather than defined through socially sanctioned cultural scripts of acceptability (Chandler and Rice Reference Chandler and Rice2013, 230).
Turquoise Hearts participants highlighted that, as disabled people, they are not expected to be able to engage in sea swimming:
Isla: There’s a group started of sea swimmers, and I got introduced to the woman last week and I went, oh I’d love to do that. And she says to me, well I don’t think you could, and I went, oh, I could … So, I’m thinking through coming to our [group] … I’m thinking, well watch me then … ‘cause I’m gonnae do it. So, I’m gonnae join that one down there
Isla defies this assumption of her “incapability,”Footnote 4 refusing the stranger’s definition of her based upon the singular aspect of her disability (Clare Reference Clare2020); instead Isla engages in and embraces the embodied practice of swimming, using materials like floats, the arms of others, and embodied rituals (including the “ring ‘round the rosy’” discussed above) (Nishida Reference Nishida2022):
Isla: I was never a strong swimmer… I think with me, I like to do everything and have a go, see if I can do it. And I think having progressive MS [Multiple Sclerosis] and your balance is crap … when you’re in the sea if you fall over you’re in the water so you’re not going to hurt yourself … but I find it difficult, I couldn’t go in myself because I need the help to get in, and so I’ve got like somebody on either arm … And then, once I’m in I’m a wee bit better, but when I first started, I had to have a float, because I forget things and it’s like I’m thinking, I can’t even remember how to swim. But … this year I’ve actually not needed a float.
Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) highlight water as a space for “ethico-political” practices, “uncovering silenced narratives of subjugation, of opening up a space for alternative and diverse stories” (33). While Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) are discussing regimes of race and apartheid in South Africa, in Isla’s story we can see the reclamation of public space and expressions of physicality by disabled swimmers as part of a similar (re)claiming of the socially restricted identity of “wild swimmer,” enacted in the space of a public beach, made possible through the ecological structures of the swimming group supporting her—experiences embedded in solidarity, not “cure” (Clare Reference Clare2020; Nishida Reference Nishida2022).
Across the Turquoise Hearts discussion, disability was characterized as critical to the experience, producing “beauty, pleasure and satiation in non-normality” (Chandler and Rice Reference Chandler and Rice2013, 238). Amongst the humor and levity of the conversation, group members’ reasons for engaging in open-water rather than pool swimming highlighted the necessity of disability:
Quincy: I’ve always swam all my life, you know, in swimming pools, but I’m semi-sighted now, so when I swim in the swimming pool … [laughs] I veer off, you can’t stay in your lane … you can veer off in the sea!
Keith [discussing his balance issues]: But there was one big wave came and hit me … gravity was winning the contest and I was heading and I just seen [Support Worker] running towards me, and she grabbed me. So that was great fun
These examples highlight the role of play, care, and embracing difference that contribute to this wild swimming group as an ecology of care, creating the potential for a disability and mental health justice-to-come that embraces radical joy without needing to define it as “recovery” from disability.
Relatedly, the Freshwater Wanderers highlighted arduous temperature and weather patterns as integral to their enjoyment of loch swimming, noting the importance of the challenge, and that the benefits they derived from swimming were not dependent on pleasant weather. In some cases, the worse the weather, the more satisfied they felt:
Taryn: The challenge as well, because you are … challenging yourself, swimming through the summer right into the … winter, and how far you can … go with that, and it’s like, everyone’s got their own little, sort of, personal challenge, because some people, once it starts getting a bit too cold, that’s them, but I think some of us are [laughs] quite keen when it gets really quite freezing …
Delilah: There’s something so liberating and just so exciting about arriving at the loch and realizing that it’s iced over, and you’re just like, yes!
Delilah: I think when it’s driving wind and sleet and rain and you’re thinking, it’s dark, I sometimes question my choices … It can be pretty bleak, but there’s some kind of buzz …
Eleanor: But you see when we’ve had … nighttime swims, and we’ve got our head torches on. We don’t do it that often, but when we do, it’s quite …
Taryn: It’s quite exciting … It’s interesting, when you’re on the bank and you’re looking out and it’s just black, and you just … go into the water with a head torch, and you just see a little bit in front of you, it’s just like swimming off into the abyss.
These small acts of deviance described by both groups demonstrate a relationship between reclaiming spaces and identities, and evolving self-perception (Laws Reference Laws2009), as the group members’ bodies are not seen as the correct type to swim in the sea (Turquoise Hearts), or the loch is not seen as an appropriate place to spend time when it is dark, raining, snowing, or iced over (Freshwater Wanderers). However, a sense of achievement and overcoming of challenges was central to the positive experiences described by both groups, contributing to their continued engagement in and enjoyment of wild swimming, which in turn they felt benefitted their mental health in a number of ways.
4.2 Affect, healing and nature: enrolling blue spaces in ecologies of care
Affective experiences were intrinsically tied to group members’ understandings of how wild swimming benefitted their mental health. This went beyond a clinical focus on benefits of particular activities to encompass subjective wellbeing and embodied sensory experiences as part of a broader mental health care praxis.
Located within the Scottish context, both groups specifically engage in cold water swimming—there is arguably no other type of wild swimming in Scotland, given the local climate. For participants in both groups, this was central to relating their engagement in wild swimming to mental health. Studies have sought to explore potential benefits of cold water (e.g., Huttunen et al. Reference Huttunen, Kokko and Virpi Ylijukuri2004; Oliver Reference Oliver2021). For our participants, the experience of cold water was related to subjective impacts, in a way that was less obviously definable as “mental health care,” until participants described their experience in those terms. This is also echoed in a limited way in some literature on cold water swimming. For example, Huttunen (Reference Huttunen, Kokko and Virpi Ylijukuri2004), in a study on winter swimming in Finland, found that swimming in cold water beneficially impacted participants’ emotional state, in turn impacting “normal life” (143). This was reflected by our participants’ emphasis on water temperature, and the prophylactic effect of wild swimming, described here by Freshwater Wanderers:
Lana: When I wake up … the world is a horrible place and everything’s negative, and there’s just this negative slant, and it used to really get me down, and I thought I could change it, but now I realize I can’t, I just change the way I think about it. I just get up, and I get my stuff and I go. I go swimming and that sets me up. Even if I cannae be arsed doing it, and the rain’s battering the window, I still do it, and then that sets me off and gets me in that place, and then I’ll have quite a busy day after that and then I’m like, yes! Even at seven o’clock, I’m going to my bed, I don’t care, I’ve done enough, I’ve achieved enough today.
Eleanor: … You know the feeling you will have if you don’t do it … you might lie in bed and hear the rain … but how am I going to feel about ten o’clock this morning when I haven’t had a swim? And thinking, do you know what, it takes me ten minutes to get there, I might only swim for five minutes, and you get your clothes back on again, and you come home and you can get dry and cozy.
Delilah: I also think there’s another side to it as well, and this is something that we don’t do particularly often, and you guys maybe see it differently because you don’t have a full-time job … we are predominantly morning swimmers and for all those benefits that you’ve just said … if I’m at my work during the day and I know I’m going to get a swim at night, I feel like it makes my day better, because I know that I’ve got that to look forward to … And then when you get into the water, it’s almost just like, ahhh … it brings you back, it grounds you somehow … I don’t know if that’s the cold, if it’s the nature.
Freshwater Wanderers members spoke to the prophylactic effect the swims had on their mental health, noting that even those that did not feel they had particular “mental health problems” before starting wild swimming, now notice the impact the swims have on how they feel, “unlocking” a new level of well-being they had not had in their routines before. They draw on the performative aspects of routine, expectation, and community that tie them to the praxis of swimming, even while expressing a love-hate relationship with the more challenging aspects of the activity.
Turquoise Hearts members also narrated an at-times love-hate relationship with cold water swimming, again highlighting the importance of routine, practice, and performance to feeling the benefits of the swims. For example, Isla discussed her relationship with cold water and her daily acclimatization exercise:
Isla: I hate it, but once I’m in I don’t want to come back out … To prepare for going swimming this year, I slightly turned the shower down a bit, down a bit, down a bit, so I got used to the cold … you feel … alive—when you come out of the water and you just feel, wow, I’m glad I’ve done that … You make all the excuses not to go in, but you’ve done it.
Sharing fears about wild swimming, often related to the initial experience of cold water, and reassuring each other, was another point of connection for the group, evoking the routinized practice that ties them together as an ecology of care:
Keith: I think the first time I went in the water I was thinking that was just about the first and last time [laughs] and then you feel the cold water rising up your leg and … then once you get under the water, it’s amazing.
Keith: I think the biggest hurdle to begin with was just the fear of going into the water … I’ve got this horrible fear of not seeing the bottom … when it’s really cloudy, I can feel the anxiety, really high, because you can’t see the bottom, you can’t see around about you too far. Like today I was talking about this because you couldn’t see too far out, so there could be somebody [something] quite close. But obviously we don’t get these sorts of dangers, actually, you know, so that’s, I think that’s just a primal fear. Once I’m in the water … I don’t really care too much … I’m just swimming about … It’s just overcoming that … the silly fears.
Quincy: They’re not silly.
Keith: We tend to, with anxiety disorders and that you’re …
Isla: Over-thinking.
Keith: You’re making fear where there’s none, and you know what I mean, like, the fear that, oh, there might be something in the water, where there isn’t, or even if there was it wouldn’t care about you, you know.
In this exchange, the members of Turquoise Hearts explicitly connect their swims, and in particular their related fears, to the mental health challenges for which they attend the support group, highlighting benefits of group swimming. The ecology of care they have built enables their engagement in activities that, for Keith, improve his experience of an anxiety disorder—but the group, and routine, aspect of the swims is as integral to this practice of healing as the actual physical swimming and being in “nature.”
For both groups, the routine dimensions of their wild swimming praxis generated an expansive appreciation of and attention to the specific landscapes to which they return; enhancing their engagement with the material, embodied, affective, and sensational nature of the swims and the group dynamics that form ecologies of care (Care Ecologies Group et al. Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022). For both groups, the experience of being in the water was narrated as an embodied practice, bringing members into the present moment. For example, from the Freshwater Wanderers:
Lana: D’you know, nothing ever stops my head, but I can bring it back more when I’m in the water and really appreciating touch, smell, sight, sound, people, you know, and it slows you down … you’re always living your life as to what you’re doing next. But when you’re here, you’re here.
Lana: Yeah, and you’re present in the snow and ice in winter and driving rain, do you know what I mean, there’s nowhere else you can be … you’re in the moment, definitely.
These examples also incorporate a temporal, or even “time-freezing” aspect to the swims, in juxtaposition with the temporal impacts of the weather. The routine and experience of “being in the moment” stays the same, while the actual physicality of the moment changes throughout the year. Turquoise Hearts members also narrated wild swimming as enabling a sense of “being present” in the moment, helping them to appreciate their surroundings:
Keith: What I like about the sea is when I put my mask on and my snorkel, you go into a different world … It’s peaceful, it’s quiet, the sunlight’s coming through and it’s sparkling all ‘round about you. And if there’s any sort ae weeds growing up … seaweed, it’s, sort of, like walking through a forest, but, underwater.
Isla: What I love is lying back and floating, just shutting your eyes. And I always seem to get this, like, red light that comes through, I don’t know what it is, just lying back you think, this is just, I could just float here all day, and you could … It’s, like a feeling of nothingness, it’s serene.
These experiences reflect previous work on the potential benefits of green/blue spaces, highlighting that “the intensity of the experiences perhaps encourages people to become focused on the present moment, giving them a break from their … worries” (Burlingham et al. Reference Burlingham, Denton, Massey, Vides and Mark Harper2022, 8). One potential impact of thinking with, within, and through bodies of water can be deeper inquiry, through “a practice of care-full attentiveness, a practice of witnessing” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022, 35), which can become entangled with other practices and forms of storying one’s life.
This developing sense of groundedness had wider effects, with members of both groups discussing increased attentiveness and creativity as added benefits to encounters with cold water. Like the Turquoise Hearts experiences above, Freshwater Wanderers suggested the practice of being present and “noticing” helped them to appreciate their environment, inviting a heightened sense of awareness and appreciation for nature, with broader impacts. For Lana, this impacted her creativity as a photographer:
Lana: Spending a lot more time outdoors and the swimming and the combination seemed to, kind of, reignite a bit of creativity in me that I’d been losing … it kind of seeped from taking cool photos … sunrise and sunset and then it started seeping, kind of, into my work as a photographer.
This suggests that the benefits are not just about “being in the moment” of the activity, but in learning a praxis that enables similar attention and reflection in other spheres of life. For Lana, this response-ability manifests in continuing to co-coordinate the swimming group and expanding her professional practice to offer mindful photography experiences.
Lana: Doing the swimming and the outdoors helped with my creativity and enjoyment of photography … I’ve always been into meditation as well, but it’s certainly put me on the journey that I went on to try and work out how, as a photographer, I could, kind of, take swimming or outdoors and connect them and maybe share the pleasure that I get with other people, but through a different … medium … that encouraged me to do mindful photography and … participatory video.
Similarly, Keith of Turquoise Hearts takes photos and videos of their swims, then shares them with the others. This sharing forms a practice of care within the Turquoise Hearts group ecology, as the other group members use those photos to “hold on” to the positive impacts of the swims throughout the week. Isla reflected on how she looked forward to Keith sharing the photographs after their weekly swim, prompting the group to reminisce about a previous week, enhancing it as a shared experience:
Isla: Oh, I love that [sharing the photos] because … you know when you do the swim on a Wednesday you’ve got Keith’s pictures on the Friday to look forward to.
Keith: I actually forgot about last week, I’ve not got many because the sea was too far out, but I’ve got a couple. So, I’ll put them on as well as when I get these ones processed.
Quincy: The sea was miles out; all we could do was …
Keith: It was funny, got up to about there.
Quincy: And all we could do was, like, roll about it, we found a, sort of, dip …
Keith: I don’t think [Swim Coach] was wanting to go out, you ken, she said, are you sure? It was like, we’re here, we’ve got changed, we’re going out, we’ve got to go.
Lana, Keith, and Quincy’s experiences reflect the Care Ecologies Group et al.’s (Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022) concept of “‘caring’ as resensitizing, a rehearsing of an attentional capacity that incorporates mutual response-ability” (253). Scholarship on care across multiple fields highlights the relationship between collectivity and creativity, impacting artistic practice (Care Ecologies Group et al. Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022; Clare Reference Clare2020; Chandler and Rice Reference Chandler and Rice2013). For our participants, the format of the group enabled the creativity, overcoming of fears, and development of care-full practices described above, which in turn facilitate attention and “response-ability” within the group and beyond.
4.3 Group dynamics: mutual constitution of community and individuality
In both groups, mutual support was critical to enabling engagement. Embedded in landscapes that mean something different when in contact with deviant bodies or when not in an ideal temporal/seasonal state, the experience of wild swimming is transformed into a praxis of care and pleasure through the group setting. These evolving group dynamics of mutual support emphasize “wildness” or free-form development of the groups, further highlighting the utility of thinking about these groups as ecological. Shefer and Bozalek (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) suggest wildness as useful for “rethinking essentialised and internalised emphases on ‘wellness and well-being’” (32; see also Josewski et al. Reference Josewski, de Leeuw and Greenwood2023). Both groups were formed in a more “organic” way than, for example, being pre-defined by a mental health professional or government program. Freshwater Wanderers formed out of the relationship between a pair of friends who swam together, then invited others to join them, before obtaining official safety training. The Turquoise Hearts swimming group is one of many activities facilitated by their community support organization, at the request of the service users—in this case through Quincy’s experiences as an avid swimmer. The “wild” or “ecological” development of these groups reflects connections between its members, evolving to resist simplistic links between wild swimming and wellbeing—for example through their experiences of challenges-as-benefits, entangled with the subtle ways in which they connect to themselves, each other, and nature through their praxis.
Members of both groups stated that they would likely not be wild swimmers if they had to go on their own, whether due to mental or physical barriers. Turquoise Hearts members spoke to the encouraging atmosphere propagated by the group’s shared circumstances:
Keith: I don’t think I’m strong enough in the water myself … I really need to have the encouragement to do it. And these guys encourage us to do it.
Isla: I just wouldnae get in myself …
Keith: Yeah, I’d probably get to my ankles and go, no. When I’m by myself, this is just too cold, but when there’s other folks going with you it encourages you to keep going.
Keith [discussing benefits of the group]: Encouraging each other. And, like Isla was talking about, with the progressive MS and that, I’d be encouraging Isla to do it, and she encourages us to do it … so we’re all encouraging and helping each other to do it. And finding the right people’s important.
Relatedly, the role of facilitators, both the more formal Turquoise Hearts model and the group founders from Freshwater Wanderers, was highlighted as important to the wild swimming; facilitators’ carrying of safety aspects of the swims enhanced the comfort and positive sensory experiences that participants reported. Turquoise Hearts members discussed how their swim coach was intrinsic to this experience, navigating possible impediments to a peaceful swim as they monitored water conditions and temperatures, and informed them of how long to stay in, enabling participants to let go:
Keith [discussing conversations with Swim Coach]: Oh, can we not stay in longer? No, because there’s a danger of hypothermia … Although you feel nice and warm and that, your body’s cooling down all the time …
Keith: Someone that takes away you having to do it. So, you only have to concentrate on the swimming bit, you don’t have to worry about what’s the tide time, what’s the temperature, how long should I be in? We don’t need to think about that, we just go in and enjoy ourselves.
Similarly, Eleanor times the swims for the Freshwater Wanderers group, heading for the shore when it is time to get out, with the group following at their own pace. This “gentle nudging” ensures safety for newer swimmers without dictating how more experienced group members conduct their own swims.
Corazon et al. (Reference Corazon, Gramkow, Poulsen, Lygum, Zhang and Karlsson Stigsdotter2019) emphasize the critical importance of fostering accessibility to nature both through adaptation and facilitation/support, to counteract inaccessibility. Corazon et al. (Reference Corazon, Gramkow, Poulsen, Lygum, Zhang and Karlsson Stigsdotter2019) also emphasize the need to balance this with maintenance of “natural” spaces: “some of their most positive and powerful narratives about green spaces related to experiencing a pristine green space that was made accessible to them without its naturalness being compromised” (6). The enjoyment of participants in our focus groups was to an extent predicated on the experience of a beautiful, “pristine”, wild-feeling space (as described above), which impacts the types of accessibility measures that would be seen as acceptable to swimmers. Rather than enforcing a top-down structure, we found that the experience of engaging with facilitators was an acceptable measure that, similarly to in Corazon et al.’s study (Reference Corazon, Gramkow, Poulsen, Lygum, Zhang and Karlsson Stigsdotter2019), “could … reinforce a sense of community and equality with those providing the assistance” (8).
Stories such as those discussed so far in this paper highlight the relationship between individual experiences of nature and the group setting. Another critical theme within the wild swimming groups’ ecologies of care speaks directly to flexibility and changeability within group structures and relationships, leading to a sense that the individual is also nurtured within the context of the collective. Laws highlights this as a feature of outdoor therapeutic landscapes, where there is literally more space to define oneself within the group: “by (the lack of) its physical setup, group dynamics are indeed able to be dynamic” (Reference Laws2009, 1832). The Freshwater Wanderers highlighted the ways this manifested for their group:
Eleanor: Maybe we don’t all come all of the time … or we might say … I didn’t speak to this person today … but at the same time, someone else will have. You’re not in anybody’s face … like Lana’s saying, she has days that she likes to go away on her own and have a wee wander once she’s had her swim …
Dora: Everyone does their own thing … There’s no judgement …
Delilah: I think you can interact as much or as little as you want to, which is something that’s quite nice about it … you can be on your own in the loch, but you can equally be on your own on the shore … there’s been days that I’ve came out and … I’ve been like that, right in the thick of it, chat, chat, chat, and there’s other days where I’ve … felt like I’ve been on the periphery of it, because I’ve chosen to be … And that’s fine, you don’t have to be involved if you don’t feel like it. Sometimes you just want to be with your own thoughts as well.
This approach echoes that developed by the Care Ecologies Group et al. (Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022), in thinking of care as complexity, accepting both shared values and individuality, which they emphasize as important to thinking about intersections. The Freshwater Wanderers connect this back to different relationships formed within the group, underscoring the utility of an ecological, evolving framework:
Delilah: Quite often, people come along and they don’t know anybody or they’ve just heard about us … but then you do see wee friendships being made … And then people will maybe go off and do something else if they want to … that’s not related to swimming, but they’ve made friends through the swimming. And other people don’t, because they choose not to. They just like the connection of coming along, doing the swimming, this is my group on a Saturday morning, and then I go home and I don’t see anybody for the rest of the week … it’s nice to watch the different dynamics … in the group grow and change as people come and go.
The flexibility in care described by swimmers in this section speaks to Ojeda et al.’s (Reference Ojeda, Nirmal, Rocheleau and Emel2022) “emergent ecologies,” as continuously “in process of becoming” (149), developing life-affirming praxis. Shefer and Bozalek’s (Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022) work also reflects this sense of evolution through their emphasis on “wildness,” exploring complexity and contradiction—such as the tension between individuality and the group—in ways that help us to challenge “tamer,” institutionalized approaches to care and mental health. This sense of possibility, becoming, and orientation toward futurity was reflected in the experiences of Keith from Turquoise Hearts, who emphasized the role of this sense of possibility in changes to his own individual mental health, enacted through the group:
Keith: Oh, god, aye, I was never out the house, I was in my own little world for years, and it wasn’t until I came, started with the hospital and then coming here, that I actually want to engage with things now. But if I was left to my own devices, I wouldn’t be doing this sort of stuff, there’s no way I’d [be] … in the sea … and also … being around people. I don’t really like being around people too much but I’m beginning to … not relax, as such, but not so much want to run away. [laughs]
Keith: When… I was doing the concert thing last week … I could cope … because Turquoise Hearts was there, I could not have done that without that support and help … it’s a huge boost that, it really is.
4.4 Politics of access: wild swimmers’ thoughts on green/blue space policy
Beyond the political acts embodied by these swimming groups and the development of ecologies of care that draw on a sense of wildness, the groups highlighted specific political concerns entangled with their swims. Turquoise Hearts members emphasized the need to engage different groups, particularly younger people, and that this came with a need for funding:
Keith: Yeah, grab them [government/policymakers] by the lapels and shake them, and say you need to spend money on it … They need to invest money into this, more so especially for younger people, to catch it and to make it better, because most of us, if we had been given the help we get now in the past, we wouldn’t be where we are now … so many years of my own wasted, but there you are, you know.
Keith’s point above reflects Chandler and Rice’s (Reference Chandler and Rice2013) contention that disability joy can also maintain the “dull rage and pain” (237) of ableist societies. For the members of Turquoise Hearts, who discussed their experiences with statutory services, the distinction between their group and more standardized services was also highlighted:
Keith: To actually have, not government-run things, but actual private things like this, and just say, there’s money, go and do your thing. Don’t interfere in it too much. Because, unfortunately I worked with the council for a long time, the local authority, so there’s so many restrictions on what you can and can’t do. They don’t have that sort of thing here, which allows them to do a lot more things than what you can do within a … hospital that couldn’t do the things that we do here because of restrictions.
Work by Power and Hall (Reference Power and Hall2018) underscores this point by noting that, while the Scottish Government has ambitions towards localism, the constraints of funding and impact of austerity limit the actual implementability of this approach. Freshwater Wanderers, similarly to Keith above, also highlighted a lack of younger people within their group:
Delilah: I think there’s maybe something to be said about … educating younger people, maybe, about the benefits of outdoors and cold-water swimming and nature and stuff … I’m not saying that jumping in a loch would have saved him [local teenager who died by suicide], but you know … I think when you look at our group, it’s predominantly over a certain age group. There’s not a lot of young people come.
Delilah: Yeah, how to do that, but then it becomes that whole health and safety risk assessment stuff, because in schools, trying to do anything like that is just a nightmare, so I don’t know, that was just a thought that popped into my head there about the benefits for younger [people] …
This conversation highlighted challenges in involving different groups in “wilder” therapeutic landscapes. Members from both groups drew attention to who participates, where, and why, and the importance of considering contexts, including constraints and accessibility, in conversations around blue space groups for mental health improvement. Indigenous approaches to mental health can enable questioning of colonial logics reproduced in policy, including those that might exclude young people from engaging with the land (e.g., Zantingh et al. Reference Zantingh, Hey, Ansloos, Dueck and Sundararajan2024; Josewski et al. Reference Josewski, de Leeuw and Greenwood2023). This in turn informs discussion around the ongoing development of ecologies of care as “emergent” ecologies that develop outside or in spite of structural constraints (Ojeda et al. Reference Ojeda, Nirmal, Rocheleau and Emel2022)—and that may in practice be as exclusive as they are inclusive. Finally, related to the consideration of context, the Freshwater Wanderers highlighted the Scottish context and the role this plays in access to blue space:
Lana: We’ve all got the Right to RoamFootnote 5 and stuff here, so there’s that … since COVID, I suppose … [the] loch has become [much busier, full of people coming from farther away] … we’ve found other ways … more car sharing … but yeah, if you want to swim, we’ll find a way to swim.
Highlighting the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing impacts, as Lana does here, is particularly pertinent for drawing attention to the importance of conceptualizing practices and communities such as wild swimming groups as ecologies of care. The chaos of the pandemic was a time of deep reflection for many, where imagining a more liveable future for all felt necessary. It was in this stretched-out moment that the benefits of green/blue health/spaces/activities were keenly felt by a broader range of people, and related groups emerged in the UK and beyond. In the reclamation of blue/green health from the state, groups began to move beyond “state-sanctioned” and “limited structural access to care” (The Care Collective 2020, 254; see also Hall and McGarrol Reference Hall and McGarrol2013).
At the same time, the points raised by the Freshwater Wanderers indicate discomfort with the increased popularity of their swimming spot due to the pandemic, particularly as they also highlighted what they considered to be anti-social behavior around littering/maintenance of the space. This increased presence also brought increased scrutiny, resulting in the removal of an informal memorial near the loch. This raises concerns about the human-centric nature of much of the engagement in green/blue spaces now being promoted, providing food for thought about the future of natural ecosystems and their relationships with humans.
Conceptualizing wild swimming groups as ecologies of care reminds us of the mutuality and entanglement of such practices with impacts on the planet and its non-human inhabitants (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022). Viewed in this political context, Scotland’s Right to Roam, and the precarity of this right within capitalist logics of extraction and human-centered engagement with natural spaces, gives us pause. In the face of struggles faced by different communities, including the crises in young people’s mental health that stood out for our wild swimming groups, people engaging this way—reclaiming deviant weather conditions and deviant bodies, paying attention, and accessing and maintaining wild spaces—are key actors in praxis that benefits from and cares for blue spaces.
5. Drawing together: wild swimming groups as ecologies of care
Our work with Turquoise Hearts and Freshwater Wanderers demonstrates the importance of relationality, geography, material-human-place-interaction, and consideration of access (particularly disability justice) to wild swimming for these groups. These are all part of and critical to the benefits they receive from wild swimming—focusing on emergent, life-affirming ecologies of care, rather than individualized approaches to mental health that disregard “natureculture” (Shefer and Bozalek Reference Shefer and Bozalek2022). In searching for “how” wild swimming benefits mental health, we have traversed a much more complex interplay of individual-group-world entanglement, eventually conceptualizing these collectives as ecologies (Care Ecologies Group et al. Reference Curandi, Gloerich, Molenda, Muntinga, Querubin, Scholts and van der Vlugt2022; Nishida Reference Nishida2022). These experiences of engaging with blue spaces intertwine uncomfortably with the role of environmental destruction in producing oppression, un-wellness, and unliveability for different groups (Zantingh et al. Reference Zantingh, Hey, Ansloos, Dueck and Sundararajan2024; Ojeda et al. Reference Ojeda, Nirmal, Rocheleau and Emel2022). By reclaiming the spaces of sea and loch, the wild swimming groups who told us their stories enact small, local ways of countering extractivist narratives, emphasizing blue spaces as of critical importance the way they are, to the folks who live alongside them.
This paper explored two focus groups with wild swimming collectives in Scotland—meaning that this work is not generalizable. While this is a limitation in mental health scholarship that seeks straightforward, scalable solutions, we also note that this level of geographical-specificity and in-depth, “small,” “slow” research is often lacking in mainstream mental health research. This approach enabled us to better understand the benefits of wild swimming, including through our own engagement in the practice. It also led to the “surprising” (Timmermans and Tavory Reference Timmermans and Tavory2012) development of an analysis centered on these groups as ecologies of care. Other scholars highlight the need to consider the ways oppression and destruction of ecosystems are entangled within “an ecofeminist ethics of care” (Serafini Reference Serafini2021, 222)—emphasizing the particular experiences of groups in a given space, place, time, and political context as beneficial to emancipatory practice. In this work, this is exemplified by the role of disability as a critical strength of the Turquoise Hearts swimming group—due in part, however, to shared experiences of oppression drawing members together in both joy and rage/refusal (Chandler and Rice Reference Chandler and Rice2013; Nishida Reference Nishida2022). Simultaneously, we are aware that our small study is also based in the minority world and lacks engagement with broader politics around water, leisure, and relationships with coloniality, particularly work led by majority-world scholars. Being in Scotland, and with limited diversity amongst our group members, we also acknowledge the privilege within the groups, and that there are further questions to be asked about who is able to access wild swimming and who is not. This is further limited by a lack of detailed demographic information about the participants in this study.Footnote 6
Drawing on the lively focus groups we conducted with Turquoise Hearts and Freshwater Wanderers, as well as our embodied experiences of swimming in the sea and loch with them, we have explored how these Scottish wild swimming groups can be conceptualized as life-affirming, evolving ecologies of care. Through political acts such as reclaiming deviant bodies and “inappropriate” weather conditions, emphasizing the mental health needs of excluded groups such as young people, and the importance (and challenges) of the Right to Roam, the groups defy normative ideas about individualized, depoliticized approaches to mental health care. Engaging in a praxis of care that is changeable, enrolls affect and nature as healing, and supports the mutual constitution of communities and individuals within the groups’ spaces, the wild swimmers demonstrate ways we can care for one another and our mental health through delight in the power and serenity of blue spaces. In the anthology “Women on Nature,” Katharine Norbury (Reference Norbury2021) writes
while I still believe in an inclusive ecology, or enfolding net, of which we are but a part, it is also apparent that of all the creatures, plants and features of our land, sky and seas it is our species that has the greatest capacity to act consciously for the good of the whole. To act to conserve, to shape, to change, to renew, to invigorate that which we encounter, not merely to observe and catalogue its fall (7–8).
In a hyper-local way, these wild swimming groups have demonstrated one way in which we can go about this process, by appreciating, noticing, and rejoicing in natural spaces—unconsciously contributing to their futurity and necessity as a “care-full” impact of seeking better mental health.
Acknowledgements
The Sea to Spruce project was funded by an Edinburgh Mental Health Network ECR Seed Funding Scheme grant. The authors would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their enthusiastic support and very helpful feedback. Special thanks to Dr Rebecca Helman for kind and constructive comments on the paper, and to our research group leader Professor Amy Chandler for creating a supportive team environment.
Dr Sarah Huque (she/her) is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh, where she is a Co-Investigator on the “Discovering Liveability: Coproducing Alternatives to Suicide Prevention” project, and PI of “Sea to Spruce.” Sarah’s broader career has centered the intersections of health and social justice, with interests in methodological innovation and participatory research. Her research has included work on disability rights; activism and community organizing; suicide and mental health; global health; and green/blue spaces and ecologies of care.
Dr Emily Yue (she/her) is Mildred Blaxter Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her current project engages feminist STS methods to explore the “evidence” around suicide knowledge in the UK. More broadly, she is interested in the intersections of work and suicide; and exploring green/blue spaces as ecologies of care.
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