This book discusses how counselling, a profession known for diverse and innovative practices, has recently been influenced by scientific, marketplace, and administrative developments corresponding with a medicalized focus on psychiatric diagnoses and related evidence-based treatments. Tensions associated with this medicalized focus refer to competing logics and accountabilities regarding how to understand and address concerns brought to counselling. Tom Strong reviews such tensions as they relate to counsellors’ approaches to practice experienced as incompatible with a medicalized approach. The role of media and technology, therapy culture, and counsellor education, are examined with respect to medicalizing tensions that professionals and clients of counselling increasingly face. The book will interest readers who share concerns regarding the potential for a mental health monoculture grounded in the diagnose and treatment logic of medicalized counselling. 1. Tensions in Medicalizing the Talking ‘Cure’.- 2. Discourses of Counselling and Human Concern.- 3. Human Concerns as Diagnosable Mental Health Disorders.- 4. Legitimizing an Emergent Mental Health ‘Monoculture’?.- 5. Individualizing and Socializing the Mental Health Monoculture.- 6. Medicating and Technologizing our Diagnosable Lives.- 7. Medicalizing Tensions Associated with Administering and Regulating Counselling.- 8. Tensions for Front Line Counsellors?.- 9. Tensions in Training Counsellors?.- 10. Living with Tensions Associated with Medicalizing Counselling.
Tom Strong is a professor, couple and family therapist, and counsellor-educator at the University of Calgary, Canada. He researches and writes on the collaborative, critically-informed and practical potentials of discursive approaches to psychotherapy. This book discusses how counselling, a profession known for diverse and innovative practices, has recently been influenced by scientific, marketplace, and administrative developments corresponding with a medicalized focus on psychiatric diagnoses and related evidence-based treatments. Tensions associated with this medicalized focus refer to competing logics and accountabilities regarding how to understand and address concerns brought to counselling. Tom Strong reviews such tensions as they relate to counsellors’ approaches to practice experienced as incompatible with a medicalized approach. The role of media and technology, therapy culture, and counsellor education, are examined with respect to medicalizing tensions that professionals and clients of counselling increasingly face. The book will interest readers who share concerns regarding the potential for a mental health monoculture grounded in the diagnose and treatment logic of medicalized counselling. Traces developments and current controversies associated with counselling’s movement toward increased medicalization
“This book is a timely critique of medicalization and pathologization in the context of counselling. Tom Strong is extremely knowledgeable about counselling practice and the cultural tendencies that he criticizes, and he manages to communicate his message clearly and convincingly to the reader. I give this book my warmest recommendations.” (Professor Svend Brinkmann, Knowledge Group Manager, Department of Communication & Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark)
