Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemThe frontiers of new psychedelic therapies: A survey of sociological themes and issues(WILEY, 2022-02)Abstract Psychedelic compounds are on the cusp of being approved by medical regulators for treatment‐resistant mental health disorders. Following promising clinical trials, and as rates of mental ill health rise globally, psychedelic medicine presents a new paradigm for treating depression, anxiety, addiction and post‐traumatic stress disorder. The novelty of psychedelic therapies, the cultural stigma they elicit, and the challenges of regulation and implementation urgently call for a sociological lens onto this emerging field of psychiatry. This article identifies key sociological issues related to the medicalisation of psychedelic‐assisted therapies. It begins with a brief overview of the field's history and current treatment approaches. We then identify and critically examine three areas of sociological interest: the of role advocacy in the advancement of scientific research and the destigmatisation of psychedelics; issues related to the medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation; and integration into healthcare systems. The challenges and affordances of psychedelics to existing therapeutic models, regulation and monetisation are highlighted, and the socio‐political context of the pharmaceutical industry, research, investment and implementation is examined. Drawing on health science literature in this field, the article offers a sociological lens on clinical psychedelic medicine as an emerging and potentially paradigm shifting field of psychiatry and psychotherapy.
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ItemConceptualising and Categorising Child Abuse Inquiries: From Damage Control to Foregrounding Survivor Testimony(WILEY, 2018-09)Abstract Testimony before inquiries into out‐of‐home care that have taken place in many countries over the last twenty years has severely disrupted received ideas about the quality of care given to children in the past. Evidence of the widespread abuse of children presented before recent inquiries internationally gives rise to the question: why didn’t we know? Part of the answer lies in the changing forms and functions of inquiries, whose interests they serve, how they are organised and how they gather evidence. Using as a case study, a survey of historical abuse inquiries in Australia, this article explores the shift to victim and survivor testimony and in so doing offers a new way of conceptualising and categorising historical child abuse inquiries. It focuses less on how inquiries are constituted or governed, and instead advances an historically contextualised approach that foregrounds the issue of who speaks and who is heard.
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Item'Help for Wayward Children': Child Guidance in 1930s Australia(Emerald, 2012)Purpose: Historical studies of the expert management of childhood in Australia often make passing reference to the establishment of child guidance clinics. Yet beyond acknowledgement of their founding during the interwar years, there has been little explication of the dynamics of their institutional development. The purpose of this article is to examine the introduction of child guidance in Australia against the backdrop of the international influences that shaped local developments. Design/methodology/approach: The article investigates the establishment of child guidance clinics in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1930s. In doing so, it explores the influence of American philanthropy, the promise of prevention that inspired the mental hygiene movement, and some of the difficulties faced in putting its child guidance ideals into practice in Australia. Findings: American philanthropy played an important role in the transnational carriage of ideas about mental hygiene and child guidance into Australia. However, it was state support of child guidance activities that proved critical to its establishment. In addition to institutional developments, what also emerges as important in the 1930s is the traction gained in the broader realm of ideas about "adjustment" and mental health, particularly in relation to the efficacy of early intervention and multidisciplinary approaches to treating problems of childhood. Originality/value: In tracing its early development, the article argues for the importance of understanding child guidance not only in terms of its administrative successes and failures, but also more broadly in terms of how early intervention as an influential mode of thought and practice took root internationally. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
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ItemEngendering a Therapeutic Ethos: Modernity, Masculinity and Nervousness(WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC, 2009-03)Abstract This article considers discourses of “nervousness” as an important historical dimension of the “therapeutic turn”. By tracing an emerging therapeutic sensibility through Australian medical literature and the popular print media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it provides an Antipodean perspective on the discursive and cultural terrain receptive to Freudian ideas and psychology, which were central to the ascendancy of a psychotherapeutic ethos. Through a particular focus on concerns about “nervous men”, the article explores how perceived problems of “nervousness” destabilized masculine ideals and helped engender a greater concern with personal distress, factors significant for the florescence of therapeutic culture.
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ItemThe Talking Cure in Everyday Life: Gender, Generations and Friendship(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2009-02)This article examines the insinuation of therapeutic culture into everyday life from the vantage point of a qualitative cross-generational study of economically marginalized young women and their mothers. Against dominant assessments of therapeutic culture — as representing cultural decline, social regulation or transformation — we draw on interview narratives to analyse its practical and situated effects. We argue that desires for disclosure and open communication are not trivial or narcissistic and instead interpret them as productive emotional strategies for managing difficult circumstances, and for engendering a sense of competence and possibility.Thus a concern with`talkingthings through' is neither ineffectual nor adequately understood as a manifestation of an ahistorical feminine alignment with emotions and interior life. While we do not dismiss regulatory aspects of therapeutic culture, our analysis offers an alternative and empirically based account of the ways cultural imperatives are enacted across generations.
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ItemTheorizing therapeutic culture Past influences, future directions(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2008-12)Analyses of the influence of psychology and the growth of counselling during the 20th century commonly point to the deleterious effects of a cultural shift from reticence and self-reliance to emotional expressiveness and help-seeking. Indeed, the ascendancy of therapeutic culture has been widely interpreted as fostering cultural decline and enabling new forms of social control. Drawing on less pessimistic assessments of cultural change and recent directions in social theory, this article argues for greater recognition of the ambivalent legacy of the therapeutic turn. Through a reinterpretation of the consequences of the diminution of traditional authority, the weakening of the division between public and private life, and the rise of the confessional, the article challenges dominant readings of decline and control. In doing so, it draws attention to how psychological knowledge and therapeutic understandings of the self have given legitimacy to, and furnished a language with which to articulate, experiences of suffering formerly confined to private life. In advancing a less pessimistic interpretation of cultural change, it considers two historic moments in Australia: the advent of telephone counselling in the 1960s and the Royal Commission on Human Relationships in the 1970s.