Coproduction in Community Mental Health Implementation: Resisting Reindividualization Comment on "Routes of Well-Being, Spiritual Harmony and Recovery in Mental Health: The Community as a Policy-Maker"

Agudelo-Hernández and Giraldo-Álvarez show how coproduction can move communities from consultation to the authorship of mental health policy. I argue that this achievement is fragile at a stage coproduction rarely reaches: implementation. Implementation science includes substantial multilevel, contextual, participatory, and systems-oriented traditions, yet at particular operational points it can still carry a default grammar of individual core functions, provider-to-recipient delivery, and individual outcomes that quietly re-translates a relationally conceived policy into an individual intervention. I call this failure mode reindividualization during implementation and locate it in an underexamined question: who decides which functions are essential enough to preserve? Using the Riohacha pathway, I examine three points where reindividualization can occur or be resisted: the function, the agent, and the outcome. I then address the objection that this approach dissolves fidelity and argue that coproduction must extend to the intervention’s theory of change itself.