Lexington Books
Pages: 236
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-0-7391-9702-8 • Hardback • April 2015 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7391-9703-5 • eBook • April 2015 • $109.00 • (£84.00)
Sylvia Olney is an adjunct professor at Bemidji State University as well as a psychotherapist, social science researcher, and community educator.
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Ethnopsychiatry and Human Awareness
Chapter 2: The Heart and Soul of the Matter
Chapter 3: Attempts at Explanation
Chapter 4: Getting by with a Little Help
Chapter 5: Seeing through a Glass Darkly
Chapter 6: Getting Real
Chapter 7: Making Meaning out of Madness
Chapter 8: Lower than Angels
Bibliography
Appendix
About the Author
The conditions of psychotherapy have changed significantly in the biomedical era. This useful and thoughtful book explains how those changes work from the inside, and how they alter the moral climate of care itself.
— Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University
Dr. Olney has captured the fundamental contradictions within the system of capitalistic health care. The economic powerhouses of insurance and pharmacy companies now drive everything from diagnoses, to treatment plans, to the personal philosophies of the practitioners in the direction of profit rather than the direction of healthy patients/clients. The managed care and best practices required by insurance companies and supported by pharmaceutical companies selectively ignore large areas of psychological research while emphasizing brief and biologically-based treatments. Interestingly, Olney’s deeply probing interviews with mental health practitioners suggest that in spite of these powerful economic influences, a humanistic undercurrent continues to thrive as a kind of underground opposition. Her interviewees reveal their willingness to play the CBT/medication game for insurance reimbursement while believing that empathy, human connection, and self-awareness carry tremendous power for healing. The book provides a fascinating view of cynical practice being undermined by humanist care.
— Marsha Driscoll, Bemidji State University