The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

"This amazing panoptic survey and critique won't make you very happy, but it will show you what you are being inducted into by those who use happiness or wellbeing as touchstones for how to live your life. The Handbook is threaded together by a variety of conceptual frameworks, key among them an urgent sense that we need to grasp what is being done to us when we are encouraged and then coerced at a depth of emotional engagement that makes it difficult to disentangle ourselves from the contradictory inconsistent apparatuses of personal improvement. This book uncovers the variety of ways in which we are adapted to unbearable circumstances, and it shows us that there are alternatives to therapeutic consolation; this is an invaluable resource for everyone who thinks critically about how are selves are locked into therapeutic theory and practice, that which always holds out the false promise to help us escape it. Now, with this book as your guide, you can take your distance, even, perhaps, do something better."

Ian Parker, Emeritus Professor of Management, University of Leicester, UK

"This imaginative and fascinating handbook is a major turning point in understanding how therapeutic ideas, assumptions and practices have spread through private and public life, politics and popular culture around the world. Fifty four years after Philip Rieff inaugurated interest in the American 'triumph of the therapeutic', this book's diverse disciplinary perspectives shine new light on the myriad ways in which therapeutic culture responds to people's problems whilst simultaneously creating new forms of oppression and commercial exploitation."

Kathryn Ecclestone, co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education