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This article examines herbal medicine as an adult education response to mental health needs. It argues for greater attention to the limits of biomedicine in defining and treating mental health. Herbal medicine is presented as a critically reflexive space to question power, medical practice, and wellbeing, encouraging adult educators to reconsider dominant treatment paradigms.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":35,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/healthcare/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/herbal-medicine-an-adult-education-response-to-mental-health/588768/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/herbal-medicine-an-adult-education-response-to-mental-health/588768.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Chumphorn","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-16","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does the article connect adult education to mental health rights?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It frames mental health as a domain where citizens’ rights are disrespected and unprotected by the state, linking this gap to the adult education responsibility for recognizing and defending rights.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What critique does the article make of biomedicine in mental health treatment?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It argues that biomedicine’s reductionist and medical hegemony-based approaches distort the complexity of mental health and addiction and can lead to harmful, oppressive treatment outcomes.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How is herbal medicine presented as a response in this work?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Herbal medicine is described as offering adult educators a critically reflexive space to critique power relations among medicine, healing, and wellbeing, while supporting alternative ways of understanding health and illness.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},588768,1792122431,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":34,"category_name":35,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":44,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144},2336475401981,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/22000c94efd8d5204d?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1786935347598174694","Herbal Medicine: An Adult Education Response to Mental Health  \ntom o’brien  \nAbstract  \nAdult education is concerned with the redistribution of resources and the recognition of rights held by citizens and to have these rights respected (Honneth, 1995). Mental health is an important domain of rights that are disrespected and unprotected by the state. This article reflects on herbal medicine as a practice in adult education in response to the mental health needs of citizens. It argues that adult educators need to pay more attention to the limitation of biomedicine in the defining and treatment of mental health. Herbal medicine has potential to offer adult educators a critically reflexive space, to critique issues of power, medicine and wellbeing.  \nKeywords: Herbal Medicine, Adult Education, Biomedicine, Mental Health, Addiction  \nIntroduction  \nI grew up on a small land commission 52-acre farm in Wicklow, surrounded by nature, plants and animals. My father produced milk for the co-op and we survived on his small farm income. He borrowed money from the bank to develop the farm and paid it off through the cycles of nature and its produce. In 1997 he died of a heart attack aged 62. His struggles were the same as many of small farmers all around the world, who face the same or worse, in trying to provide a sustainable living for their families (Patel, 2008). When he died, I remember the conversations after the funeral about health, heart attacks and sausages. However, it took me a few more years to realise that sausages while not the healthiest of foods, were not the singular cause of heart disease in Ireland. At the time of my father’s sudden death, he was being treated by his doctor for heart disease. It was the failure of his medical treatment that sparked my inquiry into the limitations of medicine and led me to become an adult educator and herbalist.  \nA year before my father died I was involved with a group of local people and organisations from the north inner city of Dublin in setting up the Crinan Youth Project, in Sean McDermott Street. This was a biopsychosocial model of addiction treatment for teenagers using heroin and other substances that combined youth work with medicine, psychotherapy with art and personal development with community development. However, as time passed, I noticed that these discourses of treatment did not operate on a level playing pitch. It seemed to me that medicine was the dominant discourse of treatment that influenced how the service evolved. The rest of the discourses passively accepted their position in the hierarchy and did not challenge the status quo that maintained medicine. This became the focus of my PhD research and later as an adult educator, managing two drug treatment services, ‘The Young Persons Programme’ in Trinity Court and ‘Sankalpa' in Finglas until 2016.  \nDeveloping these ideas in Is there a way out of this clinic? (O’Brien, 2007), I tried to show how a medical hegemony or medical domination without force (Gramsci et al., 1971) existed in addiction treatment and this hegemony was supported by a reductionist model of scientific materialism that underminesand distorts the complex and profound way in which herbal medicine can facilitate the healing process (Flower, 2012) . These models of medicine and research are underpinned and supported by the pharmaceutical industry and neoliberal models of political and economic governance (Brown, 2015) . This set of political and economic relationships gave rise to a medicalised model of addiction treatment maintained and controlled by psychiatrists who continue to justify higher doses methadone, with additional prescriptions of antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills, anti-psychotic drugs, while many of the subjects of these treatments, were still self-medicating on cannabis, heroin, cocaine and sometimes alcohol (O’Brien, 2007) . As Richard Ashcroft from the Verve says,‘The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse’ (Ashcroft, 1997). Presc","cbCaic17XDjPL9xK","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaic17XDjPL9xK","pdf",79112,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Biomedicine and medical hegemony\n## Addiction treatment and adult education practice\n# Herbal medicine training and client work","[{\"question\":\"How does the article connect adult education to mental health rights?\",\"answer\":\"It frames mental health as a domain where citizens’ rights are disrespected and unprotected by the state, linking this gap to the adult education responsibility for recognizing and defending rights.\"},{\"question\":\"What critique does the article make of biomedicine in mental health treatment?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that biomedicine’s reductionist and medical hegemony-based approaches distort the complexity of mental health and addiction and can lead to harmful, oppressive treatment outcomes.\"},{\"question\":\"How is herbal medicine presented as a response in this work?\",\"answer\":\"Herbal medicine is described as offering adult educators a critically reflexive space to critique power relations among medicine, healing, and wellbeing, while supporting alternative ways of understanding health and illness.\"}]","Herbal Medicine - An Adult Education Response to Mental Health | PDF",1792065898,23]