Resilience in psychology: A critical analysis of the concept

Abstract

Historically, psychiatry and clinical psychology focused on understanding how stressful life conditions led to psychiatric disorders. With the rise of positive psychology, the focus shifted to thriving through adversity and to concepts such as resilience. However, the number of mental disorders is still increasing. Due to a neoliberal Western decontextualizing stance in psychology, the concept of resilience is at risk of reproducing power imbalances and discrimination within our society. Resilience is analysed from a critical perspective, mostly with a Marxist point of view, including Foucauldian discursive approaches, as well as a biomedical critique of the current mental health system, to illustrate the shortcomings of Western psychologies. This article illustrates how a contextualized understanding of resilience that accounts for political, historical, and socioeconomic contexts at analytical levels besides the individual may overcome this ethnocentric and neoliberal bias.