Humanizing Mental Illness demonstrates that we need to challenge our explicit and implicit biases and learn to interact with mental illness in more intentional, supportive, and inclusive ways. While ...most philosophical accounts of the matter are concerned with the question of how much agency a person with mental illness has, this book asks how we can enhance the agency of people with mental illness.
A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship based on mutual trust. In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail ...Gosselin uses her personal experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining their agency and autonomy—specifically, by giving testimony, cons tructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life activities. Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatment. In addition to mutual trust, she says, a productive therapeutic relationship requires the clinician's empathetic understanding of the patient's experiences and perspective. She also explains why psychotic patients sometimes feel ambivalent about recovery and struggle to stay committed to it. The psychiatric ethics issues she examines include the development of epistemic agency and credibility, epistemic justice, the use of coercion, therapeutic alliance, the significance of choice, and the taking of responsibility. Mental Patient differs from straightforward memoirs of psychiatric illness in that it analyses philosophic issues related to psychosis and recovery, and it differs from other books on psychiatric ethics in that its analyses are drawn from the author's first-person experiences as a mental patient.
This paper uses a non-ideal theory approach advocated for by Alison Jaggar to show that practices involved with the medicalization of serious mental disorders can subject people who have these ...disorders to a cycle of vulnerability that keeps them trapped within systems of injustice. When medicalization locates mental disorders solely as problems of individual biology, without regard to social factors, and when it treats mental disorders as personal defects, it perpetuates injustice in several ways: by enabling biased diagnoses through stereotyping, by exploiting and coercing people who are seen as insufficiently competent, and by perpetuating idealized conceptions of choice and control that do not take into account people’s real limitations and the social context of health. Through practices of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, medicalization can perpetuate injustices toward people who have serious mental disorders.
People who have mental health diagnoses are often subject to sanist microaggressions in which pejorative terms to describe mental illness are used to represent that which is discreditable. Such ...microaggressions reflect and perpetrate stigma against severe mental illness, often held unconsciously as implicit bias. In this article, I examine the sanist attitudes that underlie sanist microaggressions, analyzing some of the cognitive biases that support mental illness stigma. Then I consider what responsibility we have with respect to microaggressions. I argue that all people share in a collective responsibility to engage in acts of epistemic resistance that challenge sanist attitudes so that it is easier for bystanders who witness microaggressions, and targets of microaggressions in particular, to identify microaggressions and to point out biased behavior. The act of pointing out bias is best understood as an act of epistemic resistance that is more effective and meaningful in the context of other acts of epistemic resistance. Ultimately, whether to point out bias is an individual decision that one must make after weighing the risks involved; engaging in a range of acts of epistemic resistance, on the other hand, is a moral responsibility everyone shares.
This book considers what responsibilities affluent individuals have toward global poverty, given that global poverty is a problem with structural, political causes, and one that generally requires ...collective action. While philosophers have tended to address responsibility for global poverty in exclusively moral, political, or legal ways, Gosselin examines the intersection of these three approaches, giving a comprehensive look at affluent individuals' relationships to poverty. She thus provides both a survey of existing literature on responsibility for global poverty, as well as a positive proposal for a pluralistic and differentiated account of individual duties based on a person's moral agency, her roles within collective groups (including her occupational and civic roles), and her institutional identities as citizen and consumer. While the agents most responsible for addressing global poverty are collectives like governments and corporations, individuals have various kinds of duties to ensure that relevant groups carry out their collective responsibilities. Gosselin examines three kinds of duties at length, each with its own chapter: beneficence, redress, and institutional justice. Situating each duty in the relevant literature (moral, legal, and political philosophy), she explains how the duty is justified, who are its appropriate duty-bearers, and what actions it requires of individuals. Real-life examples that analyze causes, identify responsible agents, and explain the nature of this responsibility show the applicability of each duty to particular situations of poverty. The final chapter summarizes the many and differentiated duties individuals have based on their moral, institutional, and role identities, which in turn are based on how they are situated with respect to the global poor. A suggested list of particular actions individuals should take is given. About the Author Abigail Gosselin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Regis University. Summary reprinted by permission of Lexington Books
The scientific model of mental disorder, which is the foundation of American psychiatry, is easily imperialistic when it is applied globally. This unwarranted extension of power is especially ...problematic for women, since psychiatry is easily used to deny women discursive and agential power and to ignore social and political contexts for women’s suffering. By analyzing the epistemic function of narratives, I argue that the hegemonic power of the scientific narrative is unjustified and often harmful, and that a more accurate and more justly applied understanding of disorder requires accounting for alternative cultural narratives as well.
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The scientific model of mental disorder, which is the foundation of American psychiatry, is easily imperialistic when it is applied globally. This unwarranted extension of power is especially ...problematic for women, since psychiatry is easily used to deny women discursive and agential power and to ignore social and political contexts for women's suffering. By analyzing the epistemic function of narratives, I argue that the hegemonic power of the scientific narrative is unjustified and often harmful, and that a more accurate and more justly applied understanding of disorder requires accounting for alternative cultural narratives as well.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
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