Cybernetic Psychology and Mental Health

This book explores the cultural importance of cybernetic technologies and their relationship to human experience through a critical theoretical lens.

Bringing several often-marginalized histories of cybernetics, psychology, and mental health into dialogue with one another, Beck questions common assumptions about human life such as that our minds operate as information processing machines and our neurons communicate with one another. Rather than suggest that such ideas are either right or wrong, however, this book analyzes how and why we have come to frame questions about ourselves in these ways, as if our brains were our own personal computers. Here, the rationality underlying information theories in psychology is followed to its logical conclusion, only to find it circles back to where it began: engineered methods of human control. After tracing a series of recent developments in this vein across fields related to mental health, Beck highlights emerging psychosocial alternatives by incorporating recent work of scholars and activists who have already begun creating collective support networks in radical ways. Their work overlaps fruitfully with ideas from those, including Gilbert Simondon and Fernand Deligny, who foresaw many of the current problems with how information theories have been coupled with psychology and mental health care.

This book is fascinating reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students across psychology, mental health programs, and digital media studies, and academics and researchers with a theoretical interest in the philosophy of technology. It’s also an interesting resource for professionals with a practical interest in organizing care services under the data-driven imperatives of contemporary capitalism.