Lecture room: Árnagarður – 301. Click for a map.
Working Institution
University College of Southeast-Norway
Abstract
What is happening with family therapy? Are we in the centre or on the margins? The Nordic welfare state is under transformation. There is a heightened ideological focus on Neoliberalism and ideas from the broad field of New Public Management as the governing machine that is giving reality to Neoliberalism. These transformations have lead to a politicization of mental health work. The workshop will attend to this by presenting experiences, reflections, ideas and manners of thinking from a career in Mental Health. This career has thought me the centrality of service user participation and collaboration. To make work dependent upon following the family and the use of feedback tools as conversational tools. Working in this manner has been a journey with an increased experience of being at odds with the system, at the same time experiencing that the system needs professionals that are at odds with it. Within a system that more and more tries to realize “a free marked” of therapies in order to make neoliberalist ideals come true, I now, more and more, think of myself as a non-party political, state paid, political activist in the everyday life of persons within Mental Health Care. This political activism concerns both how we participates in the collaboration with the families and how we think about therapy in general. Central here is the necessity of attacking the medical model as now the main ideological tool in realizing a neoliberalist ideology and in transforming the welfare state to a possible non-inclusive state.