Abstract
Making a Mindful Nation offers an important genealogy of mindfulness in its current moment, configured as a psychological tool to foster positive mental health and wellness in the UK. Through ethnographic methods, Cook documents the social, political, and cultural convergences that have allowed mindfulness to become a mental health ‘best practice’. She contends that a combination of enlightenment values and romanticism put Buddhism and Psychology in conversation, forging unique possibilities for the development of meditation in Britain, which evolved into the present moment that mindfulness is experiencing as a mental health technique. Because current cultural beliefs posit that ‘everyone has mental health,’ she explores how different people use mindfulness as practice, including those with lived experience of depression and anxiety, mindfulness therapists, and parliamentarians; as well as just how, in practice, those who advocate for mindfulness as public policy learn to negotiate the demands of public participation and evidence-based research and practice in their attempts to broaden the scope and reach of mindfulness in everyday health and social settings.
After setting up this context in Chapter One, Chapter Two, ‘Depression, Optimism, and Metacognition’ documents how Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy has become one psychosocial option to treat/prevent depression and anxiety from (re)occurring. Chapter Three, ‘Mindfulness in the Extraordinary Ordinary’, explores how mindfulness experts understand such practice to benefit the everyday in every way, holding values both ‘instrumental and ethical, everyday and exceptional’ (p. 66) as well as how an unreflective everyday life risks leading to mental ill-health. Chapter Four, ‘Mindful Parliamentarians: Common Sense and Living Well’, introduces us to how mindfulness as a potential cost-effective way to get constituents back to work led to mindfulness skills training courses on offer to parliamentarians in 2013, and how this practice is understood by them as fostering wellness and a tool to destress from stressful work/lives. By drawing on interview data and participant observation, these chapters focus mostly on how individuals who practice mindfulness make sense of such practice within the context of larger discursive powers.
What might resonate most with Critical Social Policy readers are Chapters Five and Six, where the ethnographic strengths of this work really shine. Chapter Five, ‘Mindful politics, participation, and evidence’ details how the policy potential of mindfulness must contend with the expectations of public participation and (what counts as) evidence to garner political support in contemporary UK. And Chapter Six, The Skilful Means of the Mindful Advocate” documents how proponents of mindfulness learn to negotiate participatory, ethical, and economic expectations in their drafting of the Mindful Nation UK report (2015), intended to sell mindfulness as ‘an evidence-based civil society recommendation with clear policy potential as a preventative healthcare intervention’ (p. 140). These chapters will resonate with any critical activist/academic working to make health or social policy change.
Making a Mindful Nation: Mental health and Governance in the Twenty-first Century offers a substantial ethnographic history of the present on the uptake of mindfulness in the 2010s UK. With such a title, one might expect an interdisciplinary critical theory analysis of how mindfulness has become a technology of mental health governance in neoliberal times. This is not that book. Indeed, the author takes up such critiques throughout and especially in the concluding chapter as oversimplifications. Rather, Cook herself positions this work as ‘neither critical nor celebratory of mindfulness’ (p. 157).
Despite this position of impartiality, the book nonetheless offers much material for critical theorists to engage with from their respective disciplines. For example, Postcolonial scholars could pull on threads from this work to explore the new ways that Western mindfulness continues to rest on orientalist principles. Critical Race Theorists could use this work to explore the ways that whiteness now permeates cultures of mindfulness. Critical Disability Studies scholars could use this work to demonstrate how ableism continues to permeate cultural logics, with ‘living well’ antithetical to disabled states of being. Mad Studies scholars could map out the sanism inherent in preventative mental health and positive psychology values that positions those unwilling or unable to actualize ‘health-seeking behaviours’ like mindfulness as failed citizens. For Critical Psychologists, this work offers an account of just how acquisitive the psy complex is, effectively absorbing a diversity of disparate discursive fields to enable mindfulness practice into becoming a tool in psychology's arsenal. And for Survivor researchers, given that mindfulness is framed as benefitting everyone as we ‘all have mental health,’ whether those diagnosed with ‘serious mental illness (SMI)’ are also considered to ‘have mental health,’ and what policy plans there are to extend mindfulness to people diagnosed with SMI's in community and/or carceral settings. Cook's book, while not engaging these fields of critical research, is generative: it is full of content that will cause the reader to make notes in the book's margins. And as we do, cause us to be mindful of who appears, and disappears, as mindfulness enters the policy implementation arena in the twenty-first century.