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A powerful critique of how therapy reinforces neoliberal values, and a visionary call to reclaim collective responsibility in the face of systemic distress.Personal Responsibility, Inc. offers a one-of-a-kind investigation into psychotherapy's complicity with the insidious and harmful effects of neoliberalism on individuals, relationships, and society.
Increasingly, therapy functions as an arm of neoliberal ideology-reinforcing its imperatives of personal responsibility, individualism, and relentless self-improvement. These values compel people to search inward for solutions to problems created and sustained by the system itself.
But this book goes beyond critique. It presents a vision-and concrete practices-for resisting neoliberalism's pressure to seek individual fixes for structural problems.
It's time for therapists and therapy-users alike to stop blaming non-normative brains, negative thinking, or poor coping skills for the widespread suffering we experience in a world on the brink. Instead, we must name neoliberalism for what it is, reclaim our shared humanity, and begin transforming distress into collective awareness and action.
Written by a practicing psychotherapist for an engaged, non-specialist audience,
Personal Responsibility, Inc. is not a pitch for another therapeutic method. It's an uncompromising call for a cultural course correction-and a starting point for real change.
About the author
Julie Tilsen is the author of
Queering Your Therapy Practice (Routledge, 2021; winner of the AASECT 2022 Book of the Year Award);
Narrative Approaches to Youth Work (Routledge, 2018); and
Therapeutic Conversations with Queer Youth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) as well as a variety of professional articles and book chapters. Julie is community faculty in the Youth Studies Program of the University of Minnesota, an associate of the Taos Institute, and recipient of the Minnesota Association of Marriage and Family Therapy Distinguished Service Award (2011). You may find Julie watching the Minnesota Gophers Women's Hockey team, riding her bike, on a hike, or tramping through the woods on snowshoes. She's probably outside throwing a ball for her dog, Bumper. Coffee will always be involved.
