This book attempts to ‘shake up’ the current complacency around therapy and ‘mental health’ behaviours by putting therapy fully into context using Social Contextual Analysis; showing how changes to our social, discursive, and societal environments, rather than changes to an individual’s ‘mind’, will reduce suffering from the ‘mental health’ behaviours. Guerin challenges many assumptions about both current therapy and psychology, and offers alternative approaches, synthesized from sociology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, and elsewhere. The book provides a way of addressing the ‘mental health’ behaviours including actions, talking, thinking, and emotions, by taking people’s external life situations into account, and not relying on an imagined ‘internal source’. Guerin describes the broad contexts for current Western therapies, referring to social, discursive, cultural, societal, and economic contexts, and suggests that we need to research the components of therapies and stop treating therapies as units. He reframes different types of therapy away from their abstract jargons, offering an alternative approach grounded in our real social worlds, aligning with new thinking that challenges the traditional methods of therapy, and also providing a better framework for rethinking psychology itself. The book ultimately suggests more emphasis should be put on ‘mental health’ behaviours as arising from social issues including the modern contexts of extreme capitalism, excessive bureaucracy, weakened discursive communities, and changing forms of social relationships. Practical guidelines are provided for building the reimagined therapies into clinics and institutions where labelling and pathologizing the ‘mental health’ behaviours will no longer be needed. By putting ‘mental health’ behaviours and therapy into a naturalistic or ecological social sciences framework, this book will be practical and fascinating reading for professional therapists, counsellors, social workers, and mental health nurses, as well as academics interested in psychology and the social sciences more generally.

This book is the first of its kind to apply social contextual analysis to the issue of poverty. It sets out detailed accounts of poverty based on original research and shows how understanding life contexts can give us a deeper understanding of the issue. The book highlights detailed life contexts from a project exploring the everyday experience of poverty, including what poverty is and what psychology has to say about poverty. It showcases work from an original study in Australia that uses on-the-ground participatory interview research, integrating this with international literature to provide a comprehensive analysis of poverty. The chapters explore the complexity, and often the simplistic reductions used in answering questions that try to define poverty, the psychological understanding of the phenomena, how individuals experience it, and the general opinion of the status-quo regarding poverty. However, most importantly the book tries to investigate why we have not solved poverty in modern, capitalist life, and sets out recommendations for research, practice, and policy in addressing issues of poverty. Showing the need for rigorous and on-the-ground approaches to addressing poverty and its many complications, the book will be highly relevant to students and researchers in the fields of social psychology, critical psychology, community psychology, social work, and social policy. It will also be relevant for anyone interested in the application of social psychological research techniques to the understanding and intervention of social issues, by showing pathways to better explore and understand human behaviour.

This innovative book proposes an entirely new approach to social research, presenting practical ways to discover people’s life contexts in order to understand why they do what they do, which is essential for any forms of research that need to understand people. Taking a novel approach that goes beyond traditional categorisations of qualitative and quantitative research, the book starts by discussing the real basis of all research methods in social relationships, before detailing the methods for finding out about a person’s life contexts in very practical terms, accompanied by suggested questions, advice, and research tricks to help you progress. The various life contexts are then worked through chapter by chapter. Drawing on the rich and varied research experiences of all the authors, examples are given throughout, with later chapters focusing on specific research areas. Conducting Contextual Research is essential reading for postgraduate students and professionals in the fields of counselling, psychology and social work, and will be useful to anyone conducting research or inquiries to understand human behaviour, including academic researchers, detectives, intelligence operators, social workers, government service researchers, social policy analysts, and biographers.

This book rethinks the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders by putting the spotlight on their social and societal contexts, examining how these behaviours are shaped by the difficult life conditions of those suffering. Drawing on the lived experiences of nine women, this book uses in-depth case studies and interviews to discuss eating disorders with a Social Contextual Analysis framework. It prioritises the women’s own voices about their life conditions and recovery to explore the behaviour of unusual eating patterns. The book identifies common social properties across the nine women, which will become essential context when considering treatment and therapy for unusual eating. Through this more compassionate approach, readers are presented with a detailed example of new ways to analyse and treat the behaviours of mental health and therapy outside of a DSM diagnosis. Contextualising Eating Disorders is unique in its focus on giving priority to women’s voices and the social contexts behind unusual eating and will be highly relevant for all professionals working with those with unusual eating patterns, as well as students and academics in the fields of social psychology and mental health. This book will also benefit those who themselves are suffering from unusual eating patterns they might not understand.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed social interactions. Social distancing policies, lockdowns, and mandatory quarantines have accelerated the technological mediation of communication (e.g. AI-mediated communication, computer-mediated communication) on an unprecedented scale, willingly or otherwise. Many physical activities such as office work, education, and conferences have had to be performed in the online space through social media apps, the metaverse or specialized programs on mobile phones or laptops as part of pandemic control efforts. As a result, digitally mediated channels have become critical for information acquisition and communication across a wide spectrum of human activities such as education, social interaction, entertainment, and commercial activities. Human beings are increasingly reliant on non-human agents, including social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered tools, or smartphone mobile devices for most routine activities, professional communication, and social interactions. As scientific understanding of COVID-19 improves, pandemic restrictions are gradually loosening. However, it remains to be seen whether the pandemic communication paradigm characterized by heavy technological mediation and reliance on non-human agents will also gradually decline, or will the paradigm shift become deeply entrenched with further acceleration of dependency on technological mediation and non-human agents.

● Each chapter opens with a "Potential for Practice," illustrating a research-related challenge in the practice of counseling. ● Online resources—including videos of group interviews, role-play counseling sessions, and counseling staff meetings—present these Potentials for Practice in experiential ways. ● The closest competitors to this textbook are written in formal, technical language, lack online resources accompanying the textbook, and cover research concepts and techniques unlikely to be used by master’s-level counselors in practice.

Reimagining language education through intelligent technologies and computer assistance marks a shift in how we approach language learning in the digital age. With advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is potential to transform traditional methods into personalized educational experience. Intelligent systems now offer adaptive learning pathways that cater to individual proficiency levels, learning styles, and progress rates, making language education more accessible and effective. These technologies beg further exploration to effectively provide real-time feedback and support, creating a more engaging and responsive educational experience. Reimagining Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Education explores fundamental aspects of educational technology to improve language teaching and learning. It reimagines educational practice for language teaching and learning through the integration of educational technology for making the language teaching and learning process more efficient and engaging, while improving learner performance and progress. This book covers topics such as artificial intelligence, language education, and academic writing, and is a useful resource for education professionals, language learners, computer engineers, academicians, scientists, and researchers.