With Covid-19 showing no sign of abating, mental health care (from ongoing therapy to helplines) continues to be an important site of treatment for many Americans. While traditional therapy has continued to be prohibitively expensive for most, teletherapy has been covered by most major health insurance companies since the early days of the pandemic and is currently free for …
Tag Archives: Psychotherapy
Tracking Digital Psy: Mental Health and Technology in an Age of Disruption

Covid-19 and the associated social distancing orders have normalized and accelerated the use of digital technologies in psychiatry and mental health care. With the face-to-face therapeutic encounter newly fraught with infectious risks, digital interfaces have emerged as a connective tissue in a time of radical rupture and …
Book Forum: Tomas Matza’s Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia

In Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (Duke University Press, 2018), Tomas Matza traces the landscape of “psy” disciplines, practices, and institutions across postsocialist Saint Petersburg. Writing with a distinctive conceptual subtlety and care, Matza pushes beyond a range of well-established interpretations to examine the multiple ways in which psychotherapy has provided tools for people to understand …
Agitated children, turbulent trajectories: Towards a comparison between Europe and South America – a workshop report
This article describes the main discussions and contributions of the first workshop of the International Research Network on Disruptive Behaviours. The workshop was held at the “Centre for Research in Medicine, Science, Health, Mental Health and Society” (CERMES-3) in Paris, in January 2017. The second network workshop will be organised by the “Transdisciplinary Laboratory in Social Practices and …
Deborah Weinstein’s The Pathological Family
The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy
Cornell University Press, 2013. 280 pages.
In ‘The Pathological Family’, Deborah Weinstein argues that in mid-20th century America, researchers and clinicians developed a new mode of therapy to treat families focusing on structural and relational aspects of family life. In doing so, they implicitly acknowledged …
Book review: Summerson Carr’s Scripting Addiction
Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety
Princeton University Press, 2010.
323 pp., US$29.95 (paperback).
E. Summerson Carr’s Scripting Addiction is an ethnography of American talk therapy for drug users. It explores the myriad ways in which symptoms of addiction are constructed, identified, and managed in this setting. Carr’s rich and …