Dr. Hansen provides a masterful analysis of the significance of client meaning systems in the helping professions. His provocative examination of the role of meaning systems in mental health culture employs a wide array of highly engaging pedagogical methods, ranging from humor and personal reflections to thought experiments and case illustrations, and culminates in a gratifying discussion of the implications for the education and training of talk therapists. Meaning Systems and Mental Health Culture is an important book for counselors, psychologists, and social workers that is at once compelling, edifying, and unifying.
Mark B. Scholl, Wake Forest University James T. Hansen is probably the most percipient scholar in the area of mental health culture, and this book is a genuine tour de force. The writing is engaging and challenging. His focus on therapeutic talk, the counseling relationship, and the manner in which people operate out of meaning systems is as needed as it is unique in this medicalized epoch. This book should be mandatory reading for all students and professionals in each of the helping professions.
Matthew E. Lemberger-Truelove, PhD, University of New Mexico Meaning Systems and Mental Health Culture is a wake-up call to the counseling profession, which has been asleep for too long. It challenges the counseling profession's ideological positions as it has moved away from its philosophical roots. This book does the much-needed work of challenging a mental health culture that demands over-diagnoses and over-prescription.
Brian Hutchison, University of Missouri-St. Louis