Download Researching Wellbeing * Perspectives from Development Studies

Researching Wellbeing –
Perspectives from Development
Studies
Sarah C. White, University of Bath
RGS/DSA study group
28 April 2017
Summary
•
•
•
•
Wellbeing in International Development
The DSA study group
The Book
Upcoming issues (with China Mills,
Sheffield University)
Comprehensive Wellbeing
Economics of happiness
Behavioural economics
Business for Wellbeing
Relational wellbeing
The construction of wellbeing
knowledge
Who and how: methodology
What: account of wellbeing
Where and with whom: context
DSA Wellbeing Study Group
• Wellbeing panels at DSA conference every
year since 2003
• Study group ‘Wellbeing and Psycho-social
perspectives’ formed 2011
• 2016 re-formed ‘Wellbeing, Psychology and
Therapeutic Culture in International
Development
What is psy-expertise?
• Psy-expertise (psychotherapy, psychology,
psychiatry) signifies a complex of lay and
professionalised knowledge that is productive of
a psychological self, realised through an ethic of
autonomy and self-governance.
• Psy-expertise categorises social phenomena as
individual traits (attributes, deficiencies, and
capacities), often overlooking or masking social
and political contexts.
• Psychologization, psychiatrization, and
therapization signify the processes by which psyknowledge becomes dispersed and globalized,
making psychological vocabularies widely
available for understanding ourselves and others.
different kinds of psy-expertise
a) operates in distinct ways (for example,
psychiatrization may lead to prescription of
psychopharmaceuticals, whereas ‘soft skills’
training most likely would not);
b) contradict, and compete with, each other for
legitimacy (for example, between
psychodynamic and cognitive approaches);
c) may not appear explicitly ‘psy’ related (such as
emotional fitness, mental toughness, and
cognitive science).
d) psychological knowledge and technologies have
been allied with many different projects, from
torture to liberation struggles.
Therapeutic culture and Psychocentrism
While different kinds of psy-expertise are distinct, they share
much in common (e.g. individualization of social problems,
psychocentrism, reductionism, decontextualization, and
depoliticization). This constitutes a psychocentric worldview
that holds the individual as responsible for health and illness,
and plays a part in the building of ‘therapeutic nations’.
For some this ‘psychological culture’ (Gordo Lopez, 2000) is
part of a more pervasive rise of ‘therapeutic culture’
(McLaughlin, 2011), that overlooks ‘the influence of the
social’ and fosters ‘a climate where the internal world of the
individual has become the site where the problems of
society are raised and where it is perceived they need to be
resolved’. (Frank Furedi 2006, p. 1).