The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn't Work
Paul Moloney
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0745329861
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Across the world anxiety, stress and depression are on the increase, a trend which looks set to continue as austerity measures bite. The official response tells people that unhappiness is just a personal problem, rather than a social one.
Written by a practising psychologist, with nearly thirty years' experience in the fields of mental health and learning disabilities, The Therapy Industry offers a concise, accessible and critical overview of the world of psychological practice in Britain and the USA. Paul Moloney argues that much therapy is geared towards compliance and acceptance of the status quo, rather than attempting to facilitate social change.
The Therapy Industry fundamentally challenges our conceptions of happiness and wellbeing. Moloney argues that therapeutic and applied psychology have little basis in science, that their benefits are highly exaggerated and they prosper because they serve the interests of power.
About the meaning of what the sufferer is saying and doing, of the extent to which it is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. This freedom has opened the way to a happy inventiveness on the part of psychiatrists, as demonstrated in the mandate for each official American Task Force assembled to overhaul the DSM. Any new (or old) psychiatric disorder has been included, as long as there is ‘general agreement among clinicians, who would be expected to encounter the condition, that there are significant numbers of.
About certain kinds of distress as illnesses, requiring treatment by professionals? Still, the broad picture remains fairly clear. Physical health and material wealth, neglectful or abusive relationships, the values of the society in which we live: all of these intertwine to help shape or distort our biography, and especially the odds of toil, trouble and discomfort in our lives. It is possible that temperamental (‘genetic’) factors might make an indirect contribution to our susceptibility to.
Control trial methodology for all interventions.26 And yet, for the IAPT, the selection of clients and the outcomes of clinical treatment were (and are) framed first, in terms of each person’s depression or anxiety scores, as measured by one of two clinical ‘instruments’ – the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ)27 and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD).28 Moloney T02029 01 text 145 15/05/2013 11:47 146 The Therapy Industry If these uncertainties were invisible to the.
To participate, but who might also be supposed to be the least happy. Their relative absence from this research may skew the findings in significant and unpredictable ways. Is It Always Good to Smile? There are good grounds for thinking that positive psychology is actually harmful, as the American journalist and critic Barbara Ehrenreich shows in her vivid account of the rise of happiness psychology in the US and beyond. Ehrenreich reveals the inanities of a motivational training industry that.
Like a large, glowing jelly baby. Yet the idea that good cheer is not much more than sensations of bliss and good will towards everyone is simplistic at best and dangerous at worst. Whatever else happiness may be, it is a subjective state that cannot be detached from ethics and values and still less from the cultural and social world that gives rise to them, such that one person’s positivity really can be the wretchedness of another, and misery is a lot easier to measure. We can say with some.