Psychologically Informed Environments

About the Book

Psychologically Informed Environments outlines the problems inherent in working with marginal populations, (such as the homeless). The analysis considers the issue of masculinities, and how these are erased within current academic discourses. The key issue is around how emotional recovery is generated using therapeutic techniques based on praxis. It also explores how organisations can be reconfigured to initiate emotional recovery and so stop people moving around the perpetual treadmill. This needs to be undertaken by grounding the client in the present, working on past traumas, those which shape the current lifestyle, whilst thinking about a sustainable future to move into. This involves the therapist moving into the bath of steel the client inhabits. The book sets out to explore some of the problems arising from past interventions and situating a move to an emotional recovery, by rethinking current practices. It raises considerable questions around training, research and the style of the current set of interventions being undertaken. All should be appraised on whether they generate emotional recovery. This can be viewed by the use of case histories to depict the work undertaken and requires the use of phenomenological methods to detail the work.

About the Author

Dean Whittington began working with the homeless populations in 1986 and was one of the first pioneers in delivering psychotherapy with marginal populations. From 1989 until 2005, he and his team, delivered the first therapeutic services within Deptford, South East London in an organization called Orexis. It was here that extensive issues relating to early childhood ‘complex trauma’ were discovered and the links were then made to people ‘self medicating’ as adults for the subsequent impact. The general lack of awareness during the nineties propelled him to do specific research on masculinities leading to the eventual publication of Beaten into Violence. Here, one of the first qualitative therapeutic methodologies to explore the complex trauma issues was devised. This became known as relational methodology. Later he undertook the first therapeutic interventions with homeless men, drawing on the idea of emotional recovery, taking ideas from his previous work ‘Beaten into Violence’. These were initially written up in a series of reports, circulated from 2007 onwards in the charity he worked within. They were drawn upon in an article, written in 2010, eventually published in 2011 in the Attachment Journal. This is where the term ‘psychologically informed environments’ was first extensively therapeutically explored.