Unleashing Therapeutic Gain by Deploying Social Aesthetic Values in Co-Producing Healthcare Decisions

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that therapeutic gains may be unleashed by deploying social aesthetic values in co-producing health-care decisions. To this end, values-based practice (VBP) creates a decision-making process for becoming aware and recognizing aesthetic values. This may unleash therapeutic gains by generating an appreciation of the beauty, ugliness, and tastefulness in a patient’s past and current situation, and conjointly pursuing the therapeutic creation of beauty. The conceptual scope of social aesthetic actions that underpin and derive from aesthetic values are clarified first. So clarified, VBP decision-making may deploy both shared and divergent aesthetic values deliberately. The agenda of this is threefold: (i) co-producing a shared aesthetic appreciation of the patient’s situation; (ii) co-producing decisions with social aesthetic qualities of choice; and (iii) co-producing decisions to bring about desirable aesthetic qualities in the patient’s life. Extending this agenda, co-producing decisions in terms of social aesthetic values may mobilize therapeutic mediators, specifically awareness, communication, interpersonal sharing, story-making, trust, alliance, and hope. So mediated, therapeutic gains that may be unleashed are: (i) that aesthetic values in the patient’s life is given recognition; (ii) understanding the aesthetics in one’s situation, and imagining creatively the beauty worthwhile pursuing; (iii) implementing insightful decisions by which to take action and create desirable beauty in future; (iv) becoming an agent in recognizing, understanding, and taking action in creating beauty in one’s life; and (v) being inspired by beauty and the pursuit of it, by which one may be liberated from restriction from and opposition to such beauty.