Abstract Narrative practices appear to matter to psychological well-being, yet dominant frameworks generally sideline narrative practices in mental health contexts, treating them, at best, as marginal. We argue that if we are to give narrative practices their due in mental health contexts, we must set aside certain misleading imaginative frames that dominate our thinking in this domain. To illustrate this, we focus on Weinrabe and Murphy’s (2026) scaffolding–plumbing (S–P) metaphor which was newly introduced to defend the medical model by treating mental dysfunction as a harmful failure in neurocognitive ‘plumbing’, while allowing external ’scaffolding’ a role in installing and shaping that plumbing. The S–P metaphor was introduced to remind us that when focusing on the importance of external factors which shape cognition, we ought not thereby underplay the importance of what goes on within cognizers. While acknowledging this, we nonetheless give reasons for thinking the S-P metaphor itself is philosophically problematic and unhelpful for understanding how narrative practices make the sort of difference they apparently do make to psychological well-being in the here-and-now. Drawing on a Radically Enactive/Embodied account of Cognition (REC) and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH), we offer an alternative way of thinking about these matters. Within that alternative framework, narrative practices are not merely developmental supports but ongoing world-involving activities that can shape agency, possibilities, and the state of people’s mental health in real time. We illustrate how this clarification can liberate our thinking about what matters to our mental health. Focusing on the case of addiction we show, for example, how narrative practices can sustain or disrupt addictive cycles even in the presence of significant neuroadaptation. Far from ignoring the brain, our non-reductive alternative reconceives the brain as a participant in dynamic organism–environment interactions rather than the sole or main locus of psychopathology.
Hutto et al. (Sun,) studied this question.