Reimagining Therapy through Social Contextual Analyses: Finding New Ways to Support People in Distress

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.