Talia Weiner is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology at the University of West Georgia. This work emerges from her dissertation in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, which won the William E. Henry Memorial Award for best dissertation of the year in the department.
Description
"An engaging first-person account of practicing psychotherapy in our American landscape of harsh class inequality. Weiner delivers an expert critique of the neoliberal logics that seep into the inner worlds of patients and thwart the highest ideals of mental health professionals. The book is clinical ethnography at its finest." - Paul Brodwin, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee "Exceptionally smart and insightful, Therapeutic Inequalities critically examines the foundational concept of "self-management" in American mental health care. Weaving together careful ethnography and sophisticated theoretical engagements, Weiner skillfully argues that, while meant to empower patients to be active participants in their own recoveries, an emphasis on self-management effectively obscures complex power arrangements that can ultimately derail healing...A powerful and persuasive book whose insights not only contribute to explorations of psychiatry as a cultural technology, but also move the needle on how we think about mental health recovery." - Rebecca J. Lester, author of Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America "With compassion, candor, and a deep ethnographic attunement to its entwined sites, Therapeutic Inequalities does the very thing it cogently calls for: re-integrating occluded social and material realities into our understanding of relationality and the self in psychotherapy (and beyond). It will be a model for future clinical ethnographic work." - Elizabeth Nickrenz, author of Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community "Put together a sophisticated theorist and an arresting storyteller and you have Therapeutic Inequalities. While self-management in therapeutic practice may seem straightforward, with deft and nuanced analysis Talia Weiner illuminates its failings and potentials - from the therapy room to the arenas of politics and culture. A tour de force." - Kenneth J. Gergen, Swarthmore College