The Roots of Practice: An Anti-Colonial Critical Discourse Analysis of Western Nature-Based Mental Health Therapies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<div>This study seeks to explore how nature-based therapies are understood in Western “mental health” practices. Specifically, horticultural and equine-assisted therapeutic models are examined for discursive themes tied to mind-body connections, attachment and healing. Additionally, texts used to teach specific therapeutic modalities are examined to further explore common concepts such as mindfulness and coping. In conducting a review of relevant literature, similar themes were revealed which contributed to a base knowledge for understanding the discourse around nature-based therapies. Engaging in an anti-colonial theoretical framework and a modified critical discourse analysis methodology, this qualitative study explores the research question: “What are the discourses which inform Western nature-based therapies?” Ultimately, this study aims to develop a more thorough understanding of how these therapies are linked to Indigenous approaches, how practices may be appropriated and used by Western practitioners, and the shift in social work towards more wholistic therapeutic practices. </div>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".