(Exploring the Environmental and Social Foundations of Human Behaviour)
by Bernard Guerin (Author)
This
book attempts to ‘shake up’ the current complacency around therapy and
‘mental health’ behaviours by putting therapy fully into context using
Social Contextual Analysis; showing how changes to our social,
discursive, and societal environments, rather than changes to an
individual’s ‘mind’, will reduce suffering from the ‘mental health’
behaviours.
Guerin challenges many assumptions about
both current therapy and psychology, and offers alternative approaches,
synthesized from sociology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, and
elsewhere. The book provides a way of addressing the ‘mental health’
behaviours including actions, talking, thinking, and emotions, by taking
people’s external life situations into account, and not relying on an
imagined ‘internal source’. Guerin describes the broad contexts for
current Western therapies, referring to social, discursive, cultural,
societal, and economic contexts, and suggests that we need to research
the components of therapies and stop treating therapies as units. He
reframes different types of therapy away from their abstract jargons,
offering an alternative approach grounded in our real social worlds,
aligning with new thinking that challenges the traditional methods of
therapy, and also providing a better framework for rethinking psychology
itself. The book ultimately suggests more emphasis should be put on
‘mental health’ behaviours as arising from social issues including the
modern contexts of extreme capitalism, excessive bureaucracy, weakened
discursive communities, and changing forms of social relationships.
Practical
guidelines are provided for building the reimagined therapies into
clinics and institutions where labelling and pathologizing the ‘mental
health’ behaviours will no longer be needed. By putting ‘mental health’
behaviours and therapy into a naturalistic or ecological social sciences
framework, this book will be practical and fascinating reading for
professional therapists, counsellors, social workers, and mental health
nurses, as well as academics interested in psychology and the social
sciences more generally.
