My name is Marnie Wedlake. In my work lives, I’m a Registered Psychotherapist, a University Faculty Member, and a Knowledge Transfer Exchange Specialist. I am a clinician/scholar/educator. What follows are some of the philosophies, beliefs and values that guide the way I approach my work and my scholarship. These also provide me with something of a compass that I use to navigate the often-muddy terrain of daily living. I hope you will keep reading ……

I have worked in community-based mental health care since the summer of 1986. On the one hand, I have seen many changes over the years. On the other hand, it feels as though time, and evolution, have stood almost completely still.

My educational background includes an honours undergraduate degree in psychology, a master’s degree in educational psychology, and a doctoral degree in health professional education. To support and inform my doctoral research, I undertook a critical analysis and deconstruction of mental health care, more specifically, the biomedical model of mental health care.

For many years I had questioned much of what I saw happening in ‘the system’. I did this because things just did not seem to add up. My doctoral studies provided me with the time and resources I needed to be able to put many of the privileged assumptions up to question.

I have come to see that most people share a fundamental desire to experience a greater sense of overall wellbeing. Many are becoming increasingly vocal about this. In various ways, they are stating their beliefs that overall wellbeing is not created or maintained through processes and systems that pathologize how we cope with the burdens that result from the weight of carrying our accumulated adversities.

Although it does not necessarily come easily or quickly, I am completely convinced that wellbeing is a fundamental state that is available to all people. I also believe that all people live with a vast range of experiences that can both intrude upon, and support, their efforts to create and maintain wellbeing. Many factors of influence will affect the ebb and flow of these experiences, and how they show themselves in our day-to-day lives. This is where I feel that ‘modern’ mental health care has lost its way.

The experiences I refer to are things like: sadness, grief, angst, a lack of ability to make meaning, etc, etc. These, and many other things, are core aspects of the human condition. Everybody lives with them. Sometimes they are loud and powerful in our lives; and sometimes they are quiet, cooperative, and more easily carried by us. Their intensity, and how much they impact our functioning, is dependent upon a whole lot of things, including the many factors of influence we encounter each day. They are also very much influenced by the many, many ways that all of us are shaped by the various experiences we collect, starting at the beginning of our earliest times – really, from the day that we take our first breath. I also believe that we come into our lives with a temperament that is quite significant to our individual natures. Some people seem to be relatively thick-skinned from the beginning, while others seem to come into their lives as highly sensitive persons.

Those experiences I refer to above – the sadness, grief, etc – are given other names in other contexts. Some of the individual descriptors that are used by the mental health system to name these experiences are things like depression, anxiety, and psychosis. In the world of Western-based mental health care, these are often called symptoms. And, when pooled together – according to various subjectively constructed categories – these symptoms (our experiences) can be arranged to become diagnoses. This is the way, in the (currently) dominant model of mental health care.

Western-based mental health care functions according to a philosophical model that is primarily biomedical. This model assumes that the presence of what are determined to be clusters of disabling symptoms are indications of the presence of disorder. Beyond this, the biomedical model emphasizes the belief that the primary cause of these apparent disorders is some kind of biological dysfunction that has happened to the person; that something has gone wrong with the person. In the biomedical approach to mental health care, the most commonly suggested treatments are medical ones, aimed at eradicating, or at least subduing, these apparent disorders.

To great detriment, biomedically-based mental health care, gives almost no attention to the effects imposed upon people by the various psycho-socio-cultural-environmental factors of influence we encounter every day. The oftentimes-catastrophic impact imposed upon the person by the burden of carrying the weight of collected adversities is largely pushed aside by the biomedical model of mental health care.

The knowledge and experiences I’ve collected have lead me to determine that the biomedical model of mental health care is not at all a reliable one, or even a very useful one. And given its focus on disorder, the biomedical model falls sadly short when it comes to being a resource that can be used to inform the creation and maintenance of an overall sense of wellbeing. These understandings are used by me to support the work I do, both professionally and academically.

Simply put, my work is guided by my keen interest in exploring the possible reasons why wellbeing seems to be quite elusive for so many who experience significantly compromised emotional wellbeing.

Although I am confident in my beliefs, it is important for me to state that I do not believe I have all of the answers. However, I do believe that my philosophical views, and how these inform my approach to mental health care, are quite alternative to what is most commonly available and accessible. And, I do believe that walking this alternative path can indeed be used to great extent, to enable a process of creating wellbeing.

It has been my experience that the journey towards wellbeing can start within some of the humblest spaces …… like the ones that are created when two people join together in mutual regard, for conversation that is non-judgmental, and that is guided by a compassionate heart and an open mind.

My heart is compassionate. My mind is open. I will not judge or pathologize the ways that you have responded to the experiences you have collected in your life.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Marnie Wedlake, PhD, RP