Medicalizing tensions in counselor education?

The aim of this paper is to summarize research into the tensions associated with medicalization in graduate counselor education in a primarily Canadian context. Counselor education, until recently, has largely embraced pluralistic traditions of practice that are potentially at odds with a medicalized approach to practice. Medicalization here refers to a diagnostic and treatment focus most commonly associated with use of DSM5 diagnostic procedures and evidence-based treatment. Tensions, in this study, refer to competing accountabilities encountered in reconciling medicalized with other approaches to practice. Following a review of relevant textbooks, graduate program websites and curricula, Master’s-level counseling students, counselor educators, and profession leaders were surveyed and/or interviewed regarding how medicalization influenced counselor education, and for how they responded to its influence. Data across all sources were analyzed using the mapping procedures of Situational Analysis, a method useful in analyzing contested phenomena and processes. We report our findings as navigable, negotiable, and dilemmatic tensions shaping the experiences of students and other stakeholders in counselor education. We recommend ways to enable students and educators to navigate and negotiate potential dilemmas associated with medicalizing influences on counselor education. We close by discussing the implications of our findings with respect to practice and training in the UK context.     

Citizenship’s tangled web: Associations,gaps and tensions in formulations of European youth active citizenship across disciplines

Abstract

How does academic literature across various disciplines conceptualize and empirically address active citizenship? What are the potential benefits and dangers of dominant epistemological and ideological perspectives on ‘good citizenship’? Our paper engages with these questions by drawing on literature across 12 disciplines. We used textual analysis software T-LAB to quantify and visualize co-occurrences, word associations and thematic clusters in the abstracts of 770 texts gathered by eight country teams and original in-depth qualitative analyses of ideological positions and discourses taken up in a selection of key texts across the corpus. Our paper elaborates the findings: that many of the key themes surrounding young people and citizenship in the literature share little or no connection with European citizenship; that there is a significant gap in the literature on young European citizens; and that studies connected to internal, status-based factors connected to citizenship are far more prevalent than those examining external, practice-based factors or dissidence and dissent. Our conclusions examine the potential normative implications of the disjuncture between dominant conceptions and critical accounts of youth active citizenship.     

Accused for Involvement in Collective Violence: The Discursive Reconstruction of Agency and Identity by Perpetrators of International Crimes

This study explores discourses about involvement in violent intergroup conflict and international crimes from the perspective of perpetrators. Through a critical discourse analysis of 12 personal interviews carried out with individuals accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes committed during the Yugoslav conflicts, we uncover how their discourse reveals conceptions of lacking agency and powerlessness during the conflict, how it reconstructs power relationships within and between ethnic groups, and how it reflects identity management strategies destined to elude blame and responsibility. Our findings demonstrate how discourses are tainted by the legitimizing framework in which the conflict unfolded but also how they are shaped by the particular context of the communicative situation. Findings are discussed in terms of their significance for international criminal justice and its stated objectives.     

WHY IS CONFUCIANISM NOT A RELIGION? THE IMPACT OF ORIENTALISM

This study attempts to answer the question why Confucianism, the dominant “teaching” among the Three Teachings, is not a religion in contemporary China, unlike the other two “teachings,” Buddhism and Daoism. By examining this phenomenon in the social‐historical context, this study finds its origin in Orientalism. The Orientalist conceptualization of religion became part of the New Culture discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. While China has undergone tremendous social changes over the past century, the old discourse remains.     

Using Force: Australian Newspaper Depictions of Contacts Between the Police and Persons Experiencing Mental Illness

The media creates and sustains knowledge about socially relevant issues such as crime, mental illness, and policing. Past research suggests that while the media portrayal of the police is undoubtedly complex, their portrayal of people experiencing mental illness remains mainly negative. The depiction of their encounters in the mass media is of considerable interest because of the influential role the media has on public opinion and debate; however, there is a lack of current research in this area. This study aimed to examine media items in the major newspapers across Australia between January 2006 and December 2007 (n = 77) to investigate their portrayal of this interface. The dominant themes encountered in the initial analysis depicted people experiencing mental illness as dangerous and a threat to the public, where the mental health system has failed to manage them adequately. Further analyses found that people experiencing mental illness were stigmatised in a third of the media items reviewed and were represented significantly more negatively in these encounters than the police. Implications of these findings and some suggestions regarding possible strategies that could improve socially responsible media reporting and public discourse on mental illness are proposed.