Decolonising Childhood, Reconceptualising Distress: A Critical Psychological Approach to (Deconstructing) Child Well-Being

Abstract

This chapter offers three critical frames for reconceptualising the current UK concern over child mental health, from critical psychology and education, childhood studies and Fanonian perspectives. Firstly, I address how critical psychological interventions highlight prevailing strategies of psychologisation and individualisation that enter into children’s lives, in particular through educational practices. Secondly, while the discipline of childhood studies has challenged prevailing discourses that instrumentalise children and childhood and subordinate children’s current lives to utopias or (especially) dystopias of what they later could become, a new approach, ‘child as method’, is discussed as deepening such analyses to read characteristics of and relations constellated around children/childhood as diagnostic of wider axes of power. Finally, I indicate the relevance of the practical work and writing of the critical psychiatrist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, as offering insights into the ways alienation, disaffection, oppression and marginalisation are both psychic and political questions that offer new ways of understanding and engaging with distress. Such resources therefore not only indicate further resources for the consideration of cultural-historical and critical psychology but they also highlight the political agendas at play in current discussions of child mental health and prompt practical strategies for intervention.