Configuring Psychology
Access to Therapy and the Transformation of Psychological Care

This book presents a sociological study of clinical psychology as a profession and practice.

Martyn Pickersgill (Author)

9781108714228, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 March 2026

226 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.334 kg

'Pickersgill offers readers a sophisticated analytic sociology into the social shaping of mental health care, its professions, and its recipients. In demonstrating the many ways professional health care is socially made, negotiated, and flexible, he provokes us to ask what kinds of therapeutic futures do we want and need as we are shown how the systems of care can be otherwise. An excellent read.' Laura Mamo, Professor of Public Health, San Francisco State University, USA

Configuring Psychology offers a vibrant, multimodal sociological analysis of clinical psychology as a profession and practice in the UK. Starting from the widely-accepted principle and goal of enhancing access to care, it examines how political, economic, legal, and social dynamics intertwine with clinical norms and expertise. These interactions configure broader healthcare contexts, defining not only entry into therapy but also exclusion from it. Through close attention to policy developments, professional strategies, and psychologists' experiences, Martyn Pickersgill reveals how access reforms shape clinical knowledge, therapeutic practice, and understandings of psychology itself. He shows how expanding access has become both a moral imperative and a managerial project, with clinical psychologists balancing competing bureaucratic, ethical, and emotional demands in an increasingly strained NHS. As such, Configuring Psychology provides essential insights for social scientists as well as clinicians and policymakers navigating reform. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Introduction: psychology, therapy, and society
Part I. Configuring Contexts: 1. Positioning psychology: configuring professional boundaries and identities
2. Proliferating therapy: the rise of the improving access to psychological therapy (IAPT) initiative
3. Producing treatability: reconfiguring the subjects of therapy through entwinements of clinical practice and mental health law
Part II. Configuring Care: 4. Prefacing care: the reciprocal configuration of patients, services, and professionals during referral and assessment
5. Performing autonomy: working with and against healthcare structures to configure access and exclusion
6. Prompting exclusion: how 'did not attend' policies shape the involuntary discharge of patients
Coda: psychological therapy and the ambivalence of access
References
Acknowledgements.

Subject Areas: Clinical psychology [MMJ]