Book Review: Psycho-Social Explorations of Trauma, Exclusion and Violence. Un-Housed Minds and Inhospitable Environments by Christopher Scanlon and John Adlam

T his is a highly original book whose argument is supported by an ambitious, wide-ranging historical perspective and an agreeably fluent literary style. Addressing what the authors call the psycho-social, they focus on group dynamics conducive to what others might call resistance to mental healthcare, although “resistance” is not a word Christopher Scanlon and John Adlam would use in this context. It is their view that when a society, represented by its dominant group, attempts mental health treatment for what it considers to be a subject group, the result will be iatrogenic. The authors liken it to a “disturbance at the meeting point of two cultures” (p. 107). One of these “cultures” is disorganized and incoherent, again in their view, and this allows the dominant culture to excuse itself for failing: “We tried.” They illustrate this disturbance with imaginative deployment of Plutarch’s apocryphal story of Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. Alexander, stooping to conquer, asks grandly what he can do for Diogenes who squats naked in his tub. Diogenes tells the great conqueror to stop blocking his light. According to the authors, rejection of help confuses the system as “we experience our authority as being thwarted or disrespected by those we imagine we are trying to assist” (p. 96 italics in original). Unfortunately for their thesis, the population of this subject group is not clearly delimited: it could be those least able to stand up for themselves, such as the homeless, or those recently released from a psychiatric ward with nowhere to go, or it could be any group “dislocated in modernity” (p. 6). At some points in their discussion it seems to refer to a general state of mind International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 73: 69–74, 2023 © 2022 The American Group Psychotherapy Association, Inc. ISSN: 0020-7284 print/1943-2836 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207284.2022.2141010