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At the height of the Swedish welfare society, a campaign with the aim of promoting mental health issues within the Swedish labour market was launched. The title and purpose of the campaign, 'Mental health - an action of increased understanding and solidarity at work', was to illuminate mental health issues at work. Surprisingly to the organizers, the mental health campaign stirred up major opposition, especially from the political left. The idea of mental hygiene in an industrial and workplace setting, a cross-breed between the values of the Human Relations School and psychiatric science, was received with deep mistrust. The campaign caused an agitated debate in the media about power relations between employers and employees. The political disagreements were exposed in a number of articles in the daily newspapers and in the evening papers during the summer of that year. This article undertakes an investigation of the campaign literature and the media debate. The interpretation of the debate highlights different opinions about the meaning of normal mental health. Four different views of normality and mental health which demonstrate the complexity of the issue are presented. Mental health could mean adjustment and harmony, it could be a medical weapon to suppress the working class, it could even mean a neutral state of absence of mental problems, or lastly it could be a claim for the right to live a normal life.

This article examines the pedagogic discourse of The Mental Hygiene Course (1939–1970) and the subsequent Training in Social Treatment (1971–1989), in Stockholm.The aim is to investigate the development of the psychosocial concept in Sweden; how it was expressed when adapted to the changing discourses of psychiatry and psychoanalysis and to the regulative discourses of social policy during the time. The interpretation is undertaken through the guidelines of critical discourse analysis and Bernstein's structural model of the discourse of education. The outcome of the textual analysis showed that the psychiatric and regulative discourses were transmitted into the local context of social work by a technique of case writing, and the social worker/client relationship of the cases was, throughout the period, congruent with current scientific assumptions and predominant social policy. In conclusion, the concept of psychosocial work from the 1980s, which is still in use, is a mixture of psychiatric and psychoanalytic assumptions and political demands, certifying both the function of social work and the status of the client. Finally, the problems of psychosocial work attached to the dependency of social policy and psychiatric knowledge are discussed in relation to the outcome of the investigation.

Persons with mental health problems and substance abuse often have complex needs requiring many kinds of help concurrently. In Sweden, an attempt has been made to counterbalance the effects of fragmentation by means of legislation on collaboration, requiring on the individual level the use of Coordinated Individual Plans (Sw. Samordnad Individuell Plan, SIP). The aim of the study is to explore collaboration as it is indicated in SIP and other case documentation with focus on how SIP is motivated, and what kind and degree of collaboration is indicated by the documentation. 12 individual case files have been studied in six local authorities and the results have been analyzed in relation to a regional collaboration agreement and local collaboration agreements. The results show unclear motivation for SIP and that SIP is primarily used for documentation of short-term planning. Use of SIP and participation in SIP appears also to be uneven. The authors characterize SIP as an unsystematic form of interagency meeting, with documentation indicating a relatively low to moderate level of collaboration. The authors question whether SIP is an optimal form for collaboration and suggest that more distinct models such as case management or multidisciplinary teams could be more effective.

In Sweden, all parents of children aged 0–18 years are entitled to attend free parenting courses as part of a national strategy presented by the Government in 2009. This broad parental support welfare strategy is expected to fulfil the intentions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In this study, two parenting training manuals were analysed: the Canadian Connect program, based on attachment theory, and the Swedish ABC program, based on social learning theory. The results indicate that the manuals use strategies that can both hinder and support children's rights, regardless of rhetoric of children's best interests.

Aim: The aim of this study was to analyse discourses of parenting training in official inquires in Sweden that explicitly deal with the bringing up of children and parental education and how the representations of the problems and their solutions affect parental subject positions in the early welfare state and at the onset of the 21st century. Method: We carried out a discourse analysis of two public inquiries of 1947 and 2008, drawing on theories about governmentality and power regimes. Tools from political discourse analysis were used to investigate the objectives of political discourse practices. Results: Both inquiries referred to a context of change and new life demands as a problem. Concerning suggestions for solutions, there were discrepancies in parents' estimated need of expert knowledge and in descriptions of parental capacity. In a discourse of trust and doubt, the parents in 1947 were positioned as trusted welfare partners and secure raisers of future generations, and in 2008, as doubted adults, feared to be faltering in their child-rearing tasks. Conclusions: The analysis revealed how governmental problem descriptions, reasoning about causes and suggestions of solutions influenced parents' subject positions in a discourse of trust and doubt, and made way for governmental interventions with universal parenting training in the 21st century.