: 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 individuals 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 peoples 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
: Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography takes a new pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in contemporary narrative therapy, based in autoethnography and storytelling. The individual client stories aim to paint each therapeutic meeting in such detail that the reader will come to feel as though they actually know the two or more people in the room. This approach moves beyond the standard narrative practice of teaching by transcripts and steps into teaching narrative therapy through autoethnography. The intention of these 'teaching tales' is to offer the reader an opportunity to enter into the very 'heart and soul' of narrative therapy practice, much like reading a novel has you enter into the lives of the characters that inhabit it. This work has been used by the authors in MA and PhD level classrooms, workshops, week-long intensive courses, and conferences around the world, where it has received commendations from both newcomer and veteran narrative therapists.The aim of this book is to introduce narrative therapy and the value of integrating autoethnographic methods to students and new clinicians. It can also serve as a useful tool for advanced teachers of narrative practices. In addition, it will appeal to established clinicians who are curious about narrative therapy (who may be looking to add it to their practice), as well as students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry and methods.
: Based on the author`s scholar-activist interventions to promote social justice in cities, this book highlights the role engaged communication scholarship can play in fostering a more equitable future.
: Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Bringing to light the most contemporary research, policy and practice, this book presents stark evidence from Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine the root causes of homelessness and provides a robust evidence base to reimagine how we respond to homelessness.
: Music Downtown Eastside offers an in-depth look at how music-making can promote human rights among the homeless and others living in urban neighborhoods marked by poverty. Author Klisala Harrison critically examines a wide range of local initiatives and shows how they can help vulnerable citizens develop their capabilities but also sometimes unwittingly harm them.
