Turning Mental Health into Social Action
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‘Mental health’ behaviours are carefully analysed as ordinary behaviours which have become exaggerated and chronic because of the bad life situations people are forced to endure, especially as children. This shifts mental health treatments away from the dominance of psychology and psychiatry to show that social action is needed because many of these bad life situations are produced by our modern society itself. By providing new ways for readers to rethink everything they thought they knew about mental health issues and how to change them, Bernard Guerin also explores how by changing our environmental contexts (our local, societal, and discursive worlds), we can improve mental health interventions. This book reframes ‘mental health’ into a much wider social context to show how societal structures restrict our opportunities and pathways to produce bad life situations, and how we can also learn from those who manage to deal with the very same bad life situations through crime, bullying, exploitation, and dropping out of mainstream society, rather than through the ‘mental health’ behaviours.
By merging psychology and psychiatry into the social sciences, Guerin seeks to better understand how humans operate in their social, cultural, economic, patriarchal, discursive, and societal worlds, rather than being isolated inside their heads with a ‘faulty brain’, and this will provide fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and for counsellors and therapists.
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Bernard Guerin has worked in both Australia and New Zealand researching and teaching to merge psychology with the social sciences. His main research now focuses on contextualizing ‘mental health’ behaviours, working with Indigenous communities, and exploring social contextual analyses especially for language use and thinking.
