A troubled cure for a troubled mind: mental health and the idea of ‘therapeutic education’
Emma Williams (Warwick University)
5:30-7:15 pm
Time has told me/ you’re a rare find/ a troubled cure/ for a troubled mind, sang Nick Drake. In this paper, I shall explore the question of ‘educational cures’ in the context of the youth mental health crisis. I firstly turn to an influential argument against therapeutic education, developed by Ecclestone and Hayes. I shall seek to problematise their argument, by drawing on works of Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell and Adam Phillips. In these thinkers, I will suggest, we find a troubled conception of both cure and the human mind. These lines of thought allows a more constructive conception of educational therapy to start to emerge, as I shall show.
Emma Williams is Reader in Education at the University of Warwick, where she is Director of Impact and (interim) Director of Research for the Department of Education Studies. She is Co-Editor (Regular Issues) of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. Emma has published a monograph, The Ways We Think with Wiley-Blackwell, and guest edited a Policy Special Issue on ‘Philosophy, Education and Mental Health’ for JOPE. Emma’s research has been funded by the PESGB, the British Academy and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. She is presently co-leading a project on education and violence against women and girls.
For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).