Trump Therapy: Personal Identity, Political Trauma and the Contradictions of Therapeutic Practice

The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 has been felt by some as a political trauma. In response, this trauma has been worked through using therapeutic talk and practice. In this article we examine the media representations of these responses across a wide range of news sources in order to understand the way that attitudes and values regarding the politicisation of therapy are captured, reinforced and shaped. It is shown that therapy provides a legitimate ground for self-management of feelings of political hurt; that this is seen as valuable for the formation of political communities of action and resistance; and that it then comes under attack from the right precisely because of this community-forming function. Criticism of therapeutic engagement emerges as a rhetorical means of disrupting solidarity and silencing political dissent. It is concluded that these representations need to be situated within the contradictory character of a therapeutic culture that heals and empowers individuals as it situates subjects within medicalised and neoliberalised structures of power

Tutkijat osallisuuden ja osattomuuden jäljillä

Demokratia suomalaisessa lähiössä / Eeva Luhtakallio & Maria Mustranta. Helsinki : Into, [2017] Riika : Dardedze holografija, 2017. Latvia : Drukatava, 2018

Admission of an older person into a care home in Europe: exploring the dimensions of a ‘Healthy Transition’ and the potential role of social work

Transitions in gerontological social work are poorly theorised and underresearched. Although social workers are routinely involved in transitions of older people into care homes, they tend to be treated as a functional transition from one place to another rather than as a social, emotional and psychological process for the older person and their family. Evidence suggests that a healthy transition is more likely if the older person has exerted some influence over the ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of the decision, continuity between the ‘old life’ and the ‘new’ is maintained, and their concerns are acknowledged. Drawing on a theory of transition developed by Melies et al. (2000), this paper argues that social workers have the relational, communication and advocacy skills, as well as legal literacy and a rights-based perspective, to help to promote healthy transitions. There is considerable potential to develop, and evidence the value of, social work’s contribution to this often marginalised area of practice

Discourse, affect and affliction

While much recent theorizing into affect has challenged the primacy of discourse in understanding social life, this paper is premised on the intertwining of affective experience with discursive meaning. Furthermore, appreciating the entwining of affect and discourse facilitates broader understanding into the illness experience, medical decision-making and experiences of healing. Today, the biomedical discourse carries particular affective weight that can saturate experiences of affliction. Cultural understandings of disease similarly shape affect that may emerge in affliction. Social meaning, more specifically stereotypes pertaining to identities, interweave with emotion also in the context of medical practice. The doctor-patient relationship is an affect-laden encounter where the entwining of affect with social assumptions carries important, yet poorly understood, repercussions for treatment decisions and for the furthering of health inequalities. Both the elusiveness and the power of affect that unfolds in relation to discursive meaning rest on the way in which affect dwells in and resounds through the body