The understanding of what a body “is” and how it works shapes the interventions we are trained to use and how we think about psychological distress. There are at least three definitions of the body driving today’s mental health treatments, and these definitions are creating unofficial silos in the field, parceling out different understandings of embodiment and selfhood.
Many of the mainstream approaches to mental health treatment deny the specifics of the situated body and the ways our experience of embodiment, power, and oppression are present in our experiences of anxiety, or trauma, or depression. Most evidence-based practices are rooted in a universal definition of the body and thus presume that what anxiety “is” is stable and consistent across all people: that these terms are static—universal in the way they are understood, and uniform in the way they are experienced. But when we put the lens of the situated body over a term like anxiety, or trauma, or depression, these ideas become more complex, and we can ask what it might mean to include the situated body in all forms of mental health treatment.
