The document discusses the role of mental health counselors in activism and social justice. It argues that counselors should advocate on social issues and work to challenge systems that perpetuate discrimination [1]. Effective counseling requires understanding how psychological and social issues are interrelated, as society and civilization can be a source of unhappiness and mental pathology [2]. To truly help clients, counselors must engage in their own process of self-development and be aware of how they co-create the world through their work with patients [3].

1. Adriana Tanese Nogueira
Atnhumanize.com
Issues of Mental Health Counseling 2013
FAU

2.  Politics?
 Social matters?
 How psychology is related to social matters?
Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct
social, political, economic, or environmental change.
Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing
letters to newspapers or politicians, political
campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or
preferentially patronizing businesses, rallies, street
marches, strikes, sit-ins, and hunger strikes.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism)

3. Some activists try to persuade people to change
their behavior directly, rather than to persuade
governments to change or not to change laws.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism)
In the political sciences, activism can also be
synonym of militancy, particularly for a cause.
Usually, it can be understood as militancy or
continuous action towards a social or a political
change. (http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ativismo)

4. You can be an activist in you practice by two
means:
1. Advocacy
2. Theoretical and Clinical Approach
to the client

5. http://www.psysr.org/

6.  Asylum  Peace Education
 Children at Risk  Peacebuilding
 Climate Change  Poverty
 Conflict Resolution  Racial Inequities
 Disability Issues  Reconciliation
 Disarmament  Restorative Circles
 Environment  Sexual Orientation
 Global Violence  Status of Women
 Human Rights  Terrorism
 Humanitarian Aid  Torture
 Human Trafficking  Trauma
 Inequality

7. Courtland C. Lee, Ed. (2007). Counseling for
Social Justice. Second Edition, American
Counseling Association.
Lee, Courtland C., Ed.; Walz, Garry R., Ed. (1998).
Social Action: A Mandate for Counselors.
American Counseling Association.

8. In the counseling context, social justice
encompasses the professional, ethical, and moral
responsibility that counselors have to address the
significant social, cultural, and economic
inequalities that may negatively affect the
psychosocial development of various groups of
people.

9. Social justice relates to counselors’ sense of social
responsibility. It involves counselors taking stands
on social issues and working to eradicate systems
and ideologies that perpetuate discrimination and
disregard human rights.

10. Journal of the American Mental Health
Counselors Association
http://www.amhca.org/news/advocate.aspx

11. What is mental health counseling?
Clinical mental health counseling is a distinct
profession with national standards for
education, training and clinical practice. Clinical
mental health counselors are highly-skilled
professionals who provide flexible, consumer-
oriented therapy. They combine traditional
psychotherapy with a practical, problem-solving
approach that creates a dynamic and efficient path
for change and problem resolution.
(http://www.amhca.org/about/facts.aspx )

12. Traditional psychotherapy
+
Practical solving-problem approach

13.  Traditional Behavioral Therapy
 Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
 Emotionally Focused Therapy
 …and many more

14. The individual has a problem and goes to a
therapist. They work follow this line:
 They focus on the problem (each from a
different perspective
 Solve it
 And move on

15. Complex? Interrelated? Multidimensional?

16. Techniques are supposed to fix a problem, a
defined, specific, objective problem.
You learn how to use the
technique, to focus on the issue
and to fix it. And move on.

17. You see the whole and its implications,
How everything is connected
and how we belong to a web of
relations, none of us being an
island.

18. Psychological issues relating to social and cultural
reality are present in the first conception of
psychotherapy.
Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents
1929
 We all seek pleasure and avoid displeasure
 Reality doesn’t allow us to reach full happiness
 Civilization is necessary to survival
 Civilization is the source of unhappiness

19. To Freud, the first psychotherapist in history (if
we don’t count Socrates, IVbC), the source of
pathology is society.
Civilization creates discontent and mental
pathology within its members through
repression of instinct.
How could we then fix anyone who lives within society
and cannot leave it?

20. To solve the social malaise, Freud proposed the
concept of SUBLIMATION.
Informal translation:
To be able to keep living in the box you need outlets.
Ex. of outlets:
Distraction, drugs, affairs, trips, art, parties, faceb
ook, fights, gossips, soap
operas, music, hyperactivity, etc.

21. Jung disagrees with Freud. We
don’t have only instincts in the
unconscious, but a drive to
blossom, to become ourselves. This
drive pushes outwards and it’s
called INDIVIDUATION.
“One cannot individuate without dealing with the
world, that is, changing the world; as the world can
only be changed by individuated people.”

22. …a process of psychological integration, having for
its goal the development of the individual
personality. In general, it is the process by which
individual beings are formed and differentiated [from
other human beings]; in particular, it is the
development of the psychological individual as a
being distinct from the general, collective psychology.
Blocked individuation = mental problems

23. We are social beings (Aristotle) in relation to a
world that we create and we are able to change it
only when we fully express our own uniqueness.
Then we make a real contribution.
Individuation--being a natural
tendency observable in nature and
prominent in us, human beings--when blocked
engenders pathology, that is, all kind of
psychological malaise.

24. James Hillman
We've Had a Hundred Years of
Psychotherapy--And the World's
Getting Worse. (1993).

25. …let’s consider the idea that psychology makes
people mediocre and that the world is in
extremis, that it is suffering from a acute
disturb, maybe fatal, to the limits of extinction.
(Hillman)
In this case, I would say that
what the world needs is an
extreme intensity of thought
and feeling, something
radical and original, in order
to overcome a crisis as intense
as this one.

26. Psychotherapy conceived as support and
tolerance is not up to the challenge; on the
contrary, it produces counterphobic inclinations
to chaos, marginality, and extremes. Therapy as
sedation: numbness, an-esthesia, in order to calm
down, to relief from stress, to relax, in order to
find acceptance, balance, support, empathy. The
middle term position. Mediocrity.
(Hillman)

27. …to me the task of psychotherapy is to open the
mind, take care of it; no, not take care but
encourage, even put fire to the rich and crazy
mind, that wonderful bird-place (the image is
Plato’s) of thoughts that flight unleashed…
(Hillman)
Nothing of the psychic material
that comes in therapy with the
patient is mediocre, maybe just
the first level that is peeled
right away and easily…”
(Hillman, p. 174)

28. The Italian psychoanalyst, Silvia
Montefoschi summarizes Jung’s
idea of the therapist’s role.
The therapist must be aware
of the contrast individual-
collective, which belongs to
each person’s internal
dialectic. (Both tendencies
being natural: the one to be
like the others and the one to
unique).

29. To Jung, mental illness is the result of the
blockage of the individuation process and healing
is the recovering of the lost path, therefore the
recovery of the meaning of our being in the
world. (Montefoschi, p. 113)

30. The therapist succeeds in a treatment precisely up
to the point he or she has arrived in their own
moral development. (Jung, p. 83)
>> You don’t give (to a patient) more than what
you are (have achieved in your own
individuation process).

31. The therapist is the one able to turn any relation
into the place and the moment of that creative
knowledge that transforms the world. (Montefoschi, p.
115)
As each individual is not an island, so is each
therapeutic setting. The therapist being aware of
the long term influence that he or she exercises on
their patients will need to question themselves
about their stand in the world, of whom both
patient and therapist are representative.

32. Therefore, the one who wants to move in the field
of psychotherapy “cannot hide themselves
beyond techniques, but need to be completely
themselves in the dialectical human
exchange, that is, the relation with the Other.”
(Montefoschi, 1985, p. 111)

33. Each time you as a therapist are
working with a patient/client,
you are co-creating the world.
Be aware of the world you make
happen.

34.  Courtland C. Lee, Ed. (2007). Counseling for Social
Justice. Second Edition, American Counseling
Association.
 Freud, S. (1985). Il disagio della civiltà. Torino: Einaudi.
 Hillman. J. (1993) 100 anni di psicoterapia ed il mondo
va sempre peggio. Milano: Garzanti.
 Jung, C. G. (1981) I problemi della psicoterapia
moderna. Milano: Garzanti.
 Lee, Courtland C., Ed.; Walz, Garry R., Ed. (1998).
Social Action: A Mandate for Counselors. American
Counseling Association.
 Montefoschi, S. (1985). Jung, un pensiero in divenire.
Milano: Garzanti.