Browsing by Author "Carton, Tony"

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    Burnout as Alienation in the Counselling Field: The Descent from Homo-Faber to Homo-Economous
    (Scientific Research Publishing, 2016-04-08) Carton, Tony
    The concepts burnout and alienation are routinely connected in a linear unproblematic trajectory (Tomei et al., 2011) perpetuating more of an ideological conflation than providing any insight into either concept. This is not due to the selection of shoddy analytic categories but to structural determinants of thinking, more systemically interesting than the entities themselves. The author attempts to problematize, politicise and polemicize the insipid commonsense understandings of these classifications endemic in the counselling/addictions field. An informal discourse analysis was conducted on an aggregate example based on observation over several years in teaching professional practice. He concludes that the reported trajectory from alienation to burnout is more a narrative around changing ideology diffusion than a robust appraisal of social science. Furthermore, the concept of burnout serves to perpetuate, worsen and naturalise the problems it claims to remedy by a facilitation of spiritualising acts of passivity. An appreciation of alienation on the other hand enables awareness of the unnaturalness of current neo-liberal social structures. The author concludes that the quazi-religious mantra of burnout invites the reader into a regime of self-care/self-blame contradictions and proves its effectiveness not by applicability but repetition. By continued use of the concept we reify the myth of burnout and grant it credence. The author also describes how clinicians enact their own informal and invisible means of resistance to power in the workplace where solidarity is enacted through humour and humanity.
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    Counselling: The Current Opium of the People?
    (Scientific Research, 2015-04) Carton, Tony
    Western religion’s propensity to stultify holiness and the sacred is eclipsed in the profession of counselling. With its fundamentalist enthralment with the individual self, this poster-girl of liberalism, through its central modus-operandi, language has achieved a privileged rhetoric thereby relegating itself to the dustbin of history certainly in Western society. It is less a “sigh of the oppressed soul” (Marx, 1978) as the empowerment of an opportunistic harlotry that energises the profession in a neoliberal marketplace with discourses of social justice routinely cheapened and ideologically hijacked. The author designates a genealogy of this ascendant plummet learnt through retrospective insight. Counsellors have not only unconditionally accepted tablets of stone around truths but also binaries of truths. Interrogating several sacred cows in the profession including the concept of burnout, the should/need dichotomy and the parallel process he apprehends a trajectory chronicling nodal points and concluding that many undertakings within counselling serve increasingly to perpetuate a political-non-political conflation with marketplace morality idealised as liberalism morphs seamlessly into neoliberalism. What descends from a neoliberal paradise are reconfigurations of dichotomies not” of our choosing” (Marx, 1978) but of our own choice. Willingly with the anesthetising of any coherent Judeo-Christian impulses we opt for the sanctity of a vacuous Starbuck spirituality as liberalism or religion in its “degutted” version (Eagleton, 2009: p. 41) enacts the comfort of the afflicted but never the affliction of the comfortable.
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    From Second Chance Learners and Second-Class Citizens to Competent Addiction Practitioners
    (Scientific Research Publishing, 2018-04-28) Carton, Tony
    The idea that clinicians who are in recovery from addiction or substance abuse working as addiction practitioners seems deeply counter-intuitive. Compounding this is the problem that many have incurred criminal records, so the idea seems, at best nonsensical. Yet the cold hard essentialisms of professionalization and medicine gives way at times to the sophistry and serendipity of empiricism. These former sufferers know what they are talking about. The result is that there is an extremely high success rate in securing employment at practitioner, supervisor and management level as well as popularity with clients, due to them having a high affinity with lay experiences. This is an exploratory sociological article intended to raise some issues that present with the employment and training of recovering people as addiction practitioners. The tentative conclusions are that counsellors in recovery have a sophisticated awareness of the idiosyncrasies of the addiction field. However, of much more impact is the issue that they face challenges, related to matters of professionalization, stigma and the associated ongoing gentrification of the addiction field. There is a need for further research and emerging themes given the changing and reconfiguring nature of the health field and the wider neo-liberal political arena. They also possess a resilient and strength based wisdom not located in the over accessible neo-liberal vocabulary around these precepts but have experiences of the encounter with the Gethsemane understanding of deficit and purgatory; thereby the right to take back the stolen neo-liberal appropriation of resilience. They also importantly have access to alternative proven yet marginalised discourses that have stood the test of time.