Paul Rhodes - Beyond the Psychology Industry: How Else Might We Heal?

is a therapist and academic at the University of Sydney. He started his career in the deinstitutionalization movement in developmental disabilities and then went on to specialize in family therapy and also anorexia nervosa. He is also a qualitative researcher, developing innovative methods in narrative, ethnographic, dialogical, and arts-based methods and applying these to a wide range of social problems. These include the recovery movement, decolonization, feminism and eating disorders, the psychology of climate change, refugees, and community psychology.

The dominant method in clinical psychology is still cognitive and, like most models, serves as an evidence-based application of Western philosophical concepts. The original cognitive model is based on Greek and Roman stoicism (Robertson, ), transformed by the information processing of the 1980s into a formulation-driven metaphor for distress. Most contemporary models eventually become abbreviated in a similar fashion to support their promulgation: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) , acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) , dialectic behavioral therapy (DBT) . There is a new one called temperament-based therapy with supports (TBT-S) . Each of these models emphasizes the intrapsychic over the interpersonal and decontextualized, with the focus on personal control or acceptance of subjective phenomenon.

I recently read an interesting paper by Waller (, p. 122). This book serves as a manual for this kind of drifting.