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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.

Ainda que inegavelmente eficazes em ajudar clientes, musicoterapias se baseiam em tautologias e abstrações para explicarem o que acontece e isso limita sua abrangência. O presente artigo se fundamenta em uma forte posição contextual que dá ênfase aos efeitos observáveis de “musicar” nos contextos de vida das pessoas, especialmente os contextos sociais, e também destaca como eventos “internos e privados” emergem do mundo social. Os vários tipos de comportamentos, contextos e efeitos musicais foram revisados. Foi feita uma comparação com uso de linguagem, demonstrando que música não é uma verdadeira língua mas que isso traz vantagens para as musicoterapias. Os efeitos principais do “musicar” são, grosso modo, agrupados em três categorias: efeitos emocionais nos ouvintes; efeitos atencionais ou distrações; e discursos sobre música ou intepretações. Assim como na linguagem, o “poder” da música para exercer tais efeitos depende de relações sociais e não da música (ou linguagem) em si mesma, e, portanto, pode ajudar a redefinir ou reinterpretar as trocas nas relações sociais das pessoas enquanto tocam ou ouvem música. Música pode distrair eficientemente do uso excessivo da linguagem em nossa sociedade e acalmar por suplantar pensamentos ruins ou conflituosos baseados em linguagem. Foram feitas sugestões ao longo do texto sobre como terapias podem aprender com análise contextual, com comparações com usos da linguagem, e com técnicas das terapias cognitivo-comportamentais, terapias narrativas e hipnose.

This paper seeks to enlarge the range of research methods in behavior analysis to deal with situations in which even small- or single-sample experimental methods are not possible or not appropriate. This is common for most research with humans, and especially with behaviors under the rubric of social, cultural and verbal. After presenting arguments for this, the paper outlines three methods for describing the everyday, complex structuring of functional relations. The most important of these methods adapts engaged, participatory methods from other social sciences but puts the focus on finding functional relations between behaviors and their complex outcomes rather than just labelling the hidden functional relations as static social ‘structures’. Examples of these three methods are given from research on functional analyses of mental health behaviors.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review all the research on Somali refugee communities’ “explanatory models” of “mental health” or psychological suffering, and also report original research in order to allow for more contexts on their “mental health” terms to emerge. Design/methodology/approach The authors talked in a conversational manner with a small number (11) of Somali people (10 females and 1 male), but this was done intensively over time and on multiple occasions. They discussed their community terms for “mental health” issues but in their own contexts and with their own examples. Findings The results showed that Somali as a community had three main groupings of symptoms: Jinn or spirit possession; waali or “craziness”; and a group of terms for serious anxieties, rumination, worrying and thinking too much. What was new from their broader descriptions of context was that the community discourses were based on particular contexts of the person and their behavior within their life history, rather than aiming to universal categories like the DSM. Practical implications Both research and practice on mental health should focus less on universal diagnoses and more on describing the contexts in which the symptoms emerge and how to change those contexts, especially with refugee and other less well-understood groups. Originality/value The review and original results support symptom-based or contextual approaches to mental health; we should treat the “mental health” symptoms in their life contexts rather than as a disease or disorder. We can learn from how Somali describe their “mental health” symptoms rather than treat their descriptions as crude forms of the “correct” western diagnostics.

This groundbreaking book shows how we can build a better understanding of people by merging psychology with the social sciences. It is part of a trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions.Putting the ‘social’ properly back into psychology, Bernard Guerin turns psychology inside out to offer a more integrated way of thinking about and researching people. Going back 60 years of psychology’s history to the‘cognitive revolution’, Guerin argues that psychology made a mistake, and demonstrates in fascinating new ways how to instead fully contextualize the topics of psychology and merge with the social sciences. Covering perception,emotion, language, thinking, and social behaviour, the book seeks to guide readers to observe how behaviours are shaped by their social, cultural,economic, patriarchal, colonized, historical, and other contexts. Our brain,neurophysiology, and body are still involved as important interfaces, but human actions do not originate inside of people so we will never find the answers in our neurophysiology. Replacing the internal origins of behaviour with external social contextual analyses, the book even argues that thinking is not done by you ‘in your head’ but arises from our external social, cultural,and discursive worlds.Offering a refreshing new approach to better understand how humansoperate in their social, cultural, economic, discursive, and societal worlds,rather than inside their heads, and how we might have to rethink our approaches to neuropsychology as well, this is fascinating reading for students in psychology and the social sciences.

This radical book explores a new understanding of psychology based on human engagement with external contexts, rather than what goes on inside our heads. It is part of a trilogy that offers a new way of doing psychology, focusing on people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions.By showing that we engage directly with our complex social, political, economic, patriarchal, colonized, and cultural contexts and that what we do and think arises from this direct engagement with these external contexts, Bernard Guerin expertly demonstrates that Western ideas have systematically excluded the ‘social’ but that this is really where the major determinants of our behaviour arise. This book works through many human activities that psychology still treats as individualized and internal and shows their social and societal origins. These includes beliefs, the sense of self, the arts, religious behaviours, and the new and growing area of conservation psychology. The social structures found by sociology, anthropology and sociolinguistics are shown to shape most ‘individual’ human actions, and it is shown how the main points of Marxism and Indigenous knowledges can be better merged into this new and broader social science.Replacing the ‘internal’ attributions of causes with external contextual analyses based in the social sciences, this book is fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology and the social sciences, and provides exciting new ways to conceptualize and observe human actions in new ways and to resist the current individualistic thinking of ‘psychology’.

Metal identities are popularly represented as leading to mental health issues but with flawed evidence. We documented the community contexts around metal and well-being by talking to young metalheads directly.We engaged in repeated, informal talks with 28 young Australians who strongly identified with metal (aged 18–24years, 5 females and 23 males), and found that the metal identities and community protected them from mental health problems. Four core themes were found from transcripts: they were all bullied or marginalized through social relationships at school; they enjoyed the impact of metal music and lyrics when angry or ostracized; they felt part of a protective community of metalheads, even though in many cases at this age it was more imagined than real; and embodying metal identities enabled them to keep bullies, detractors, and others at bay, and to find friend groups. By talking repeatedly, directly with young metalheads, it was found that metal identities were helping participants to survive the stress of challenging environments and build strong and sustained identities and communities, thus alleviating any potential mental health issues. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This book offers a refreshing new approach to mental health by showing how ‘mental health’ behaviours, lived experiences, and our interventions arise from our social worlds and not from our neurophysiology gone wrong. It is part of a trilogy which offers a new way of doing psychology focusing on people’s social and societal environments as determining their behaviour, rather than internal and individualistic attributions.‘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.