A new study led by Dominique P. Béhague of Vanderbilt University and Kings College London, along with her Brazilian colleagues, delves into the role of socially sensitive therapy in addressing mental health concerns.
Their results, published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, present a compelling argument for a transformative approach to therapy, highlighting the limitations of current mental health policies that focus predominantly on individual-level interventions, often neglecting the broader social and political structures contributing to mental distress.
Drawing from the extensive 1982 Pelotas Birth Cohort study in Brazil, Béhague and her team reveal how socially sensitive therapy, grounded in the principles of Latin American social medicine, can empower individuals to address and challenge the systemic forces shaping their lives.
The authors write:
“What seems to have made a difference for young people were therapists who responded flexibly, recognized the limits of their own positionality, and maintained dialogic openness to unstructured reflection and the productivity of confrontation.”
They go on to add:
“Young people who returned to the clinic, despite intense feelings of disappointment and mistrust, used the therapeutic encounter to engage in social and political debate and explore new modes of agency. Clinical interactions came to center not on the treatment of disorder or symptom-reduction, but on crafting self-worth, political awareness, and social influence.”
This research underscores the need for a shift in mental health practice, emphasizing the role of therapy not just in symptom management but as a catalyst for social and political activism, particularly for marginalized communities.
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Ally, if you will excuse me, you’re sitting in the back of a cave looking at shadows cast on the back wall, not just you, most everybody, speaking in terms of understanding “the broader social and political structures contributing to mental distress.” There’s not a vocabulary for it yet because it’s the unknown, but we are not locked in individual bubbles of consciousness; we share that between us.
To give a pressing example: a mentally distressed and predisposed individual catches a virus quite prevalent on the inside of humanity today and tries to kill as many people as they can with whatever weapon they can, a gun in America, a knife or axe in China. In the inside of humanity, in our shared field of consciousness, there’s an epidemic of hatred and ill will. A person picks that up and tries to kill society with it.
You might imagine how such a sharing of thoughts and feelings would effect a society, for good and ill, hidden wills on us and our behavior, and, when you consider such a shared field between parents and children, you have the ingredients for mental distress origins now unknown.
In this instance I can truly say I’m ahead of my time, far ahead it looks like, although this was known in ancient times in some circles. I didn’t just adopt this belief. I saw it over a lifetime of the study and exploration of consciousness, and it is evidence based, gathered over long, slow years. I image it would take a group of people sharing their dreams and inner experiences together about 20 years to see it concretely enough it becomes knowledge and not belief.
You like the intersection of literature and psychology. Cordwainer Smith coined a term that well captures what we will undergo in the future, the rediscovery of man.
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