Knowing Your Place and Minding Your Own Business: On Perverse Psychological Solutions to the Imagined Problem of Social Exclusion

Abstract

We draw on ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary psychosocial theorists to analyse the ethical implications of social policies implemented through the welfare state with the espoused objective of achieving social inclusion. We argue that many such policies establish a boundary between domains of inclusion and exclusion that perversely maintains the very problem such policies are designed to solve. They then also provide ‘rationalisations’ for social exclusion which imply that such states can be explained—that they are ethical, and so legitimate. We illustrate our argument with reference to a specific area of social policy—Improving Access to Psychological Therapies—and discuss how it impacts on our own area of practice as state employed psychotherapists. We analyse how this policy frames aspects of social exclusion (un(der)employment?) as a ‘psychological’ problem: a move that grants the excluded a specific kind of identity and then locates the problem of exclusion in this identity. We invoke Plato's Republic to show how this offer of psychological ‘help’ subliminally suggests that these mental disorders result from individuals' failures to ‘know their place’ and to ‘mind their own business’, rather than as a consequence of complex networks of social (dis)orders, exclusions and injustices within which we are all embedded.

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