Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Individualism, Neoliberalism and the Imperatives of Personal Governance
- Chapter Three Individualism in Healthcare
- Chapter Four Enlisting, Measuring and Shaping the Individual in Healthcare Policy and Practice
- Chapter Five Mental Health and Personal Responsibility
- Chapter Six Responsibility in Therapy and the Therapeutic State
- Chapter Seven The Punitive Turn in Public Services: Coercing Responsibility
- Chapter Eight Thinking about Ourselves
- Chapter Nine Talking Citizenship into Being
- References
- Index
Chapter Five - Mental Health and Personal Responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Individualism, Neoliberalism and the Imperatives of Personal Governance
- Chapter Three Individualism in Healthcare
- Chapter Four Enlisting, Measuring and Shaping the Individual in Healthcare Policy and Practice
- Chapter Five Mental Health and Personal Responsibility
- Chapter Six Responsibility in Therapy and the Therapeutic State
- Chapter Seven The Punitive Turn in Public Services: Coercing Responsibility
- Chapter Eight Thinking about Ourselves
- Chapter Nine Talking Citizenship into Being
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction: Responsibilizing Distress
Personal responsibility is urged upon clients of the mental health services as never before. From informal conversations between clients and professionals to national policy documents, the collective mindset has been configured so that responsibility is extolled as a means to rehabilitation and a therapeutic outcome in its own right (Newnes and Radcliffe 2005). This might seem like a rather grand statement on its own. It may seem to differ little from the conventional advice to the downhearted to ‘pull yourself together’ and it might seem unsurprising that professional intervention imbibes something of this cultural commonplace.
Yet the presence of discourses of responsibility in the field of mental health discloses some curious tensions and contradictions. The first and perhaps the most obvious of these is that it coexists with a competing tendency in mental health research and practice, which is to see the person as primarily a biological being, propelled by genetic predispositions, neurological organization and the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters and accompanying medications. Popular science, pharmaceutical advertising and many researchers in the field themselves encourage us to see ourselves in these terms – it is as if matters of biography and milieu have been ‘molecularised’ (Niewhoner 2011). There is a palpable enthusiasm for psychiatric genomics and this has become firmly embedded within systems of psychiatric research (Baart 2010) despite the ambitious overinterpretation of what are often tentative, ambiguous or negative findings (Crow 2008).
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- Responsible CitizensIndividuals, Health and Policy under Neoliberalism, pp. 69 - 94Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012
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