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Legitimizing an Emergent Mental Health “Monoculture”?

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Abstract

This chapter traces a critical, theoretical, and historical view of contemporary mental health “culture” as it is articulated and practiced in terms of diagnosable mental disorders and evidence-based practices (EBPs). Psychiatry’s pursuit of scientific legitimacy is examined through development of DSM-III–DSM-5 and corresponding evidence-based treatments (cf. Cochrane Collaboration for Evidence-Based Medicine). Clinical psychology is examined for championing this legitimizing direction for psychology (counselling psychology included), with attention given to neuroscience as a new form of evidence. Counselling’s discourses and approaches are reviewed as conversational practices focused on meaning and behavior change, and, drawing on “common factors” of change, Chapter 4 aims to make evident the grounds for a mental health “monoculture .”

A profession is always vulnerable to changes in the objective character of its central tasks.

(Abbott 1988: 39)

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    Tom Strong

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Strong, T. (2017). Legitimizing an Emergent Mental Health “Monoculture”?. In: Medicalizing Counselling. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56699-3_4

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