mental health? student wellbeing, bereavement, and...a straight-talking introduction to psychiatric...

Mental Health? Student Wellbeing, Bereavement, and

‘Addiction’ in a Medicalizing Era

Dr. Tom Strong, University of Calgary

Dr. Jan DeFehr, University of Winnipeg

Lauren Buote, University of Calgary

Mackenzie Sapacz, University of Calgary

Presentation to the 2018 CCPA Annual Conference

Winnipeg, MB , May 13, 2018

Medicalizing discourse in

counselling and everyday life

Dr. Tom Strong: strongt@ucalgary.ca

Educational Studies in Counselling Psychology

University of CalgaryWith special thanks to Karen Ross,

Konstantinos Chondros, Vanessa

Vegter, Dr. Monica Sesma-Vazquez,

& Dr. Christiane Job McIntosh

Presentation to the 2018 CCPA Annual Conference

Winnipeg, MB , May 13, 2018

Overview

Medicalizing discourse?

Medicalizing the human condition?

Pluralistic Counselling & medicalizing discourse?

Accountable alternatives to the DSM/EBP approach?

What do we mean by Medicalizing?

Medicalization?▪ Logic of Practice

▪ Diagnose & Treat

▪ Evidence Based Practice

▪ Symptom Reduction

DSMs – some history

DSM-5 Tensions – a brief bibliography

Metaphors of Mind, Mental Health and Psychopathology

?

2 faces of contemporary medicalization

(how do their insights relate to counselling?)

Peter Conrad Eva Illouz

The shifting engines of medicalization?

Svend Brinkmann & Diagnostic Cultures?

MEDICALIZING THE HUMAN CONDITION?

MEDICALIZING COUNSELLING (TENSIONS?)

DSM diagnosing & Social Justice concerns?

Using meaning-focused methods in symptom focused counselling?

Relational Counselling?

Fee for service issues (diagnosis & EBP)

Counsellor Education

Cultural relevance?

Implications for Counselling/Counsellor Education?

▪ How do we respond to the already diagnosed client

requesting specific interventions/’treatments’?

▪ How do we respond to clients’ concerns as legitimate

with/without (de-)medicalizing them?

▪ How do we show our work is accountable to funders?

▪ What about relational and social justice aspects of

counselling? (dx/non-dx)

▪ What about counselling’s pluralism

and the common factors literature?

References

Brinkmann, S. (2016). Diagnostic cultures. New York, NY: Routledge.

Conrad, P. (2007). Medicalization of society. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cooper, M., & McLeod, J. (2011). Pluralistic counselling and psychotherapy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language. London, UK: Sage.

Frances, A. (2013). Saving normal: An insider’s revolt against out-of-control psychiatric diagnosis, DSM-5, Big

Pharma, and the medicalization of ordinary life. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.

Furedi, F. (2004). Therapy culture. London, UK: Routledge.

Gaete Silva, J., Sutherland, O., Couture, S., & Strong, T. (2017). DSM Diagnosis and Social Justice: Inviting

Counsellor Reflexivity. In D. Pare & C. Audet (Eds.). Social Justice and Counselling (pp. 197-212). New

York, NY: Routledge.

Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press.

Rapley, M., Moncrieff, J., & Dillon, J. (Eds.) (2011). De-medicalizing misery: Psychiatry, psychology and the

human condition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Strong, T. (2017). Medicalizing counselling: Issues and tensions? New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Strong, T., Chondros, K. & Vegter, V. (in press, 2018). Medicalizing tensions in counselor education.

European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Strong, T., Ross, K. H., & Sesma Vazquez, M. (2015). Counselling the (self?) diagnosed client: Generative and reflective conversations. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 43, 598-610.

Strong, T., Gaete Silva, J., Sametband, I, French, J., & Eeson, J. (2012). Counsellors respond to the DSM-IV-TR. Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 46(2), 85-106.

Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Watters, E. (2009). Crazy like us: The globalization of the American psyche. New York, NY: Free Press.

Critical Mental Health Awareness:

Ensuring Student Access to Dissenting

ScholarshipJan DeFehr, MSW, PhD

Assistant Professor,

University of Winnipeg

jn.defehr@uwinnipeg.ca

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ALGEE-action-plan-for-providing-mental-health-first-aid-Mental-health-first-aid_fig1_230628759

Action 3:

• “Help the person feel hope and optimism and realize that they have a real medical condition and there are effective treatments” (Mental Health Commission of Canada, 2010, p. 4).

https://twitter.com/RNC_PoliceNL/status/906953167128207362

• What are the key messages of mental health awareness campaigns?

Critical Mental Health Awareness

1. Psychiatry has not succeeded in producing any scientifically-validated biomarker evidence of illness (Rose, 2015); “the drive to discover biomarkers … has yielded no validated results” (Rose & Abi-

Rached, 2013, p. 140).http://www.ipharmd.net/images/test-tubes-laboratory.png

David Kupfer,

Chair of DSM-5:

• “In the future, we hope to be able to identify disorders using biological and genetic markers that provide precise diagnoses that can be delivered with complete reliability and validity. Yet this promise, which we have anticipated since the 1970s, remains disappointingly distant. We’ve been telling patients for several decades that we are waiting for biomarkers. We’re still waiting” (Kupfer, 2013, para. 1).

2. What effective treatments?

• Discrepancy between conventional and critical understandings of psychiatric drugs;

– What are psychiatric drugs?

– What do they not do in the body?

– What effects do they produce? (Moncrieff, 2009; 2013).

https://www.northpointrecovery.com/blog/psychiatric-drugs-now-killing-people-

heroin/

3. Psychiatric diagnosis: Critique

regarding legitimacy & potential for

harm

Issues of validity and reliability;

“Implied consent”: When and how diagnosis happens; Which professions diagnose?

Its permanence in medical records;

How diagnosis can be used against diagnosed persons at different life junctures;

Deficiency language: How diagnosis can change self-identity.

What are the results of mental health awareness initiatives?https://www.newberry.org/file/panopticon-page-122-and-123jpg

Continual psychiatric assessment & referral

• Commissions new diagnosticians –neoliberal citizen-diagnosticians (DeFehr, 2016);

• Produces more available/reachable psychiatric subjects;

• Extends clinical terrain to include every domain of community life;

• Trained “eyes circulate without being seen” (Mills, 2014, p. 85).https://depositphotos.com/85308484/stock-illustration-smiling-female-doctor-2.html

Practicing critical mental health awareness

“We believe it is morally wrong to present students, our colleagues,

service-users and carers with a pretencethat mental health is a cohesive and

uncontroversial field”

– Critical Mental Health Nurses Network

Retrieved from https://criticalmhnursing.org/about-us/

ReferencesCanadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association. (2008). Standards of practice. (Ottawa, ON:

Author.

DeFehr, J. N. 2016). Inventing mental health first aid: The problem of psychocentrism. Studies in

Social Justice, 10(1), 18-35.

DeFehr, J. N. (2017). Navigating psychiatric truth claims in collaborative practice: A proposal for

radical critical mental health awareness. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 36(3), 27-38.

Frances, A. (2013). Saving normal: An insider’s revolt against out-of-control psychiatric

diagnosis, DSM-5, big pharma, and the medicalization of ordinary life. New York:

HarperCollinsPublishers.

Jorm, A. F. (2000). Mental health literacy: Public knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders.

The British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 396-401.

Kupfer, D. (2013). Statement by David Kupfer, MD, Chair of DSM-5 taskforce discusses future of

mental health research (American Psychiatric Association Press Release). Retrieved from

https://dxrevisionwatch.com/2013/05/06/kupfer-apa-statement-on-national-institute-of-mental-

health-nimh-announcement/

Kinderman, P. (2014). A prescription for psychiatry: Why we need a whole new approach to

mental health and wellbeing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Linklater, R. (2014). Decolonizing trauma work: Indigenous stories and strategies. Winnipeg:

Fernwood Publishing.

Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing global mental health: The psychiatrization of the majority world.

London: Routledge.

Moncrieff, J. (2009). A straight-talking introduction to psychiatric drugs. Monmouth, UK: PCCS

Books.

Moncrieff, J. (2013). The bitterest pills: The troubling story of antipsychotic drugs. New York: Palgrave

McMillan.

Rose, N. (2015). Neuroscience and the future for mental health? Epidemiology and Psychiatric

Sciences, 1-6.

Rose, N. & Abi-Rached, J. M. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Strong, T. (2017). Medicalizing counselling: Issues and tensions. Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave Macmillan.

Medicalizing Trends in Grief and BereavementLauren Buote

Brief History of Grief

▪ A moral practice demonstrating morality and virtue?

▪ A universal, inevitable response that must be managed and put behind us?

▪ And now…—A gradual but profound shift towards a

medicalized model

Western Happiness Culture

▪ Complete happiness = worthy life

—i.e., McDonald’s in Russia, 1990

▪ Sadness, pain, grief perceived as intolerable in North American cultures

Western Medicalizing Trends

Medicalization of human experience

Intolerability of negative emotions

Euro-American Trends in Medicalization

—Persistent yearning/longing for the deceased. In young children, yearning may be expressed in play and behavior, including behaviors that reflect being separated from, and also reuniting with, a caregiver or other attachment figure.

— Intense sorrow and emotional pain in response to the death.

—Preoccupation with the deceased.

—Preoccupation with the circumstances of the death. In children, this preoccupation with the deceased may be expressed through the themes of play and behavior and may extend to preoccupation with possible death of others close to them.

—Marked difficulty accepting the death. In children, this is dependent on the child’s capacity to comprehend the meaning and permanence of death.

—Experiencing disbelief or emotional numbness over the loss.

—Difficulty with positive reminiscing about the deceased.

—Bitterness or anger related to the loss.

—Maladaptive appraisals about oneself in relation to the deceased or the death (e.g., self-blame).

—Excessive avoidance of reminders of the loss (e.g., avoidance of individuals, places, or situations associated with the deceased; in children, this may include avoidance of thoughts and feelings regarding the deceased).

—A desire to die in order to be with the deceased.

—Difficulty trusting other individuals since the death.

—Feeling alone or detached from other individuals since the death.

—Feeling that life is meaningless or empty without the deceased, or the belief that one cannot function without the deceased.

—Confusion about one’s role in life, or a diminished sense of one’s identity (e.g., feeling that a part of oneself died with the deceased).

—Difficulty or reluctance to pursue interests since the loss or to plan for the future (e.g., friendships, activities).

—The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

—The bereavement reaction is out of proportion to or inconsistent with cultural, religious, or age-appropriate norms.

Grief in the DSM…

How does this fit around the

world?• Religion

• Age and generation

• Geographic location…

What does this mean for clinicians?

Research Methods

▪ Focus groups and individual interviews▪ Mental health practitioners

▪ Participants provided the criteria and asked what their initial reactions were – both good and bad

▪ Participants asked to work through a case study of a bereaved woman, with the criteria in mind

Canada Japan

• 3 individual interviews

• 2 focus group with 2

participants each

• 1 individual interview

• 3 focus groups (3, 2, and 2

participants)

Preliminary Findings

•All data •Hesitancy to accept/reject grief disorder•Dislike of name “PCBD”•Concern of pathologizing grief experience

• “No one size fits all”

•Access to resources

Preliminary Findings

• Japanese data • Acceptance of DSM/ICD dictating practices, despite Western origins

• Concern around cut-off and timelines in reference to Buddhist rituals on 1st, 3rd, 7th

year anniversaries • Criteria focus solely on grief in individuals, not community/relational levels

Thank you!

Let’s Talk about Cell Phones…

Mackenzie Sapacz, BA. Hons., mackenzie.sapacz@ucalgary.ca

The Story of Cell Phones

1998 – Explaining how cell phones work as advertising

2001 – Explaining how phones work

2000 – School policies changing

Relatively new findings

The Story of Cell Phones

2018

“Cell Phone Addiction”

How to get over the Addiction

The Juxtaposition

Social Constructionism

Implications for Counsellors and Professionals

▪Raise awareness—Priorities

—Time

—Blessing and a curse

Tom Strong, University of Calgarystrongt@ucalgary.ca

Jan DeFehr, University of Winnipegjn.defehr@uwinnipeg.ca

Lauren Buote, University of Calgarylauren.buote@ucalgary.ca

Mackenzie Sapacz, University of Calgarymackenzie.sapacz@ucalgary.ca