Mental Health Professionals Cannot Read Minds

I’m no expert on psychology, but over the years I have undertaken some courses of study which have touched upon various aspects of the subject.  One area I have found particularly interesting is discursive psychology.  This is something which focuses on what people do (through words and actions), rather than on what they think. 

My novel, Delivered Unto Lions, is written in the first person, so the only thoughts that readers get to know are those of the character who narrates the story.  When it comes to the other characters, readers can only ‘see’ what they do and ‘hear’ what they say.  As my book is about children in a mental unit, that is the context in which the words and actions of the characters do things.  We can see what they do, but we don’t know their thoughts and motivations.  This is particularly significant in the case of the adult characters (nurses, psychiatrists, social workers, etc.), as we just do not know how they reached particular conclusions about the children in their care, or why they decided to treat them in the way that they did.

It is probably the case that we generally assume psychology to be about internal states or processes in the mind.  But as the social psychologist Michael Billig has pointed out, what goes on in the privacy of people’s minds cannot be observed; we can only guess at what is going on in someone’s head from his or her outward behaviour.  This would suggest that a lot of conventional psychology – and psychiatry, too – is guesswork.  The therapies received by the children in Delivered Unto Lions (which is, of course, factually-grounded) are therefore based on inferring what might be going on in their heads.  The behaviour of those children is observed and noted, of course, but it is assumed – without real evidence – to have particular meanings.

If I were to try and guess at what goes on in people’s minds, I would suspect that most of us feel (at sometime or other) that we are misunderstood.  Someone might appear to assume he or she knows what I’m thinking, but I know that person has got it wrong.  In the setting of the (real life) children’s psychiatric unit, where young people were subjected to all kinds of treatments by those who ‘knew best’, I wonder how many felt they were misunderstood?  I wonder how many knew with absolute certainly that the experts had got it wrong?  

Personally, I find the assumptions of discursive psychology very persuasive.  Discursive psychology – while it may well offer interpretations – primarily concentrates on what you can see and hear with your own eyes and ears.  It then analyses what it observes and tries to identify established patterns of speech and action and then discover what these ‘discourses’ actually achieve.  What discursive psychology does not do is try to tell you what you’re thinking.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu