A human right paradigm has been challenging the biomedical perspectives that tend to be normalized in the Western context concerning the lives of trans people. The aim of this study is to understand ...how trans people in Portugal and Brazil perceive the (non-)recognition of their socio-cultural, economic and political rights. Specifically, the study intends to know in what extent these perceptions influence the processes of identity (de)construction. For this purpose, 35 semi-structured interviews were conducted with people self-identified as trans, transsexuals and transvestites in Brazil and Portugal. The narratives of the participants were analyzed according to the thematic analysis method and the following six main themes emerged: (i) Who are the rights for; (ii) Types of rights; (iii) Paradigm of distribution of rights; (iv) Local or global rights; (v) Non-recognition of the "human"; and, (vi) Transphobias (and cissexism). The results allowed the knowledge of rights and the non-recognition of the "human" which is the central organizer of the analysis. Among the main conclusions of this study, we emphasize the circumscription of rights to certain international, regional and/or national contexts; the existence of local instead of global rights, since they are influenced by regional and international law, but they depend on the legislation in force in each country; and the way human rights can also be understood as a platform of invisibility and exclusion of other people. Based on a commitment to social transformation, this article also contributes to rethinking the violence that is exercised on trans people as a continuum, whether through 'normalizing devices' by medical contexts, family contexts, public space, or even through internalized transphobia. Social structures produce and sustain transphobias and, simultaneously, are responsible for fighting them by changing the paradigm about the conception of transsexualities.
“Positive” psychology has gained a dominant voice within and outside the field of psychology. Although critiques of this perspective have been rendered, including by humanistic psychologists, ...psychology scholars have offered minimum space for critical reflections of this movement in contrast to its critiques existing inside and outside the academia in other fields. Therefore, this contribution seeks to explicate emerging systematic critiques of positive psychology by scholars and practitioners from within mental health fields as well as from philosophy, medicine, education, business, and cultural studies and to highlight sociocultural discussions of positive movement by the culture critics. Last, we offer reflections on positive psychology as immigrant professionals from non-Western backgrounds with an emphasis on existential and humanities-based perspectives. We also highlight that the tenets and experiments based on “positive” psychological practices may have especially detrimental effect on marginalized individuals and communities. This contribution seeks to invite a critical dialogue in the field regarding positive psychology within and outside humanistic psychology and psychology in general.
Historic, systemic, and institutional oppression has created various forms of inequality that are of urgent interest to critical psychologists. One area of continued concern is the use of Western, ...psychological frameworks to address mental health issues for individuals whose experiences lie at diverse intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This manuscript highlights an alternative framework grounded in an African-centred theoretical approach using optimal psychology. Optimal psychology, also known as Optimal Conceptual Theory (OCT), provides a cultural responsiveness framework for understanding the behaviours, thoughts, feelings, and worldviews of oppressed populations, such as individuals of African descent in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer (LGBQ) community. This framework facilitates an affirmative psychological process of examining varying worldviews and their impacts on psychological functioning. By presenting a US-based case study, the authors demonstrate the use of an affirmative psychological framework, OCT, and discuss culturally-affirming interventions, in the clinical setting that also challenge 'WEIRD psychology'.
This article traces the presence and absence of Frantz Fanon in the field of social and political psychology. Our work is guided by an assemblage of methods— a critical analysis of mainstream ...scholarship, a collective interrogation with a transnational gathering of colleagues and friends, and a deep reading of Fanon's texts on struggle, internalized oppression, violence and a new humanism. Through this, our paper is a call for radical disciplinary reflection on why Fanon has been ruthlessly exiled from social/political psychology, the potential his writings hold for courses, scholarship, and struggle, and how we might more boldly theorize, as he did, from within the fire of struggles for justice and liberation.
Debates exist regarding the validity and utility of functional psychiatric diagnoses. How mental health diagnoses are understood has real impacts for service users and service delivery.
To ...investigate different attitudes about the utility of psychiatric diagnoses.
Forty-one stakeholders sorted 57 statements related to the usefulness of psychiatric diagnoses. Using q-methodology, four viewpoints were identified and interpreted.
Viewpoint 1 (Pathologising human experience) regarded diagnoses as pseudo-scientific constructs that lacked validity and obscured the relationships between lived experience and distress. Viewpoint 2 (Illnesses like any other) held that labels reflected real disorders and diagnosis offered important benefits for service users and services. Viewpoint 3 (Stigmatised conditions) similarly regarded diagnoses as reflecting real disorders, but diagnostic criteria were viewed as biased and the impacts of applying labels seen as causing problems for service users. Conversely, Viewpoint 4 (Useful short-hands) viewed diagnostic processes as imperfect but necessary for supporting communication and structuring service delivery.
While not all viewpoints are in keeping with empirical evidence, we hope results will enable professionals and service users to take meta-positions in relation to their own and others' attitudes, and to reflect on the impacts of privileging certain viewpoints over others.
This open access book is a systematic update of the philosophical and scientific foundations of the biopsychosocial model of health, disease and healthcare. First proposed by George Engel 40 years ...ago, the Biopsychosocial Model is much cited in healthcare settings worldwide, but has been increasingly criticised for being vague, lacking in content, and in need of reworking in the light of recent developments. The book confronts the rapid changes to psychological science, neuroscience, healthcare, and philosophy that have occurred since the model was first proposed and addresses key issues such as the model's scientific basis, clinical utility, and philosophical coherence. The authors conceptualise biology and the psychosocial as in the same ontological space, interlinked by systems of communication-based regulatory control which constitute a new kind of causation. These are distinguished from physical and chemical laws, most clearly because they can break down, thus providing the basis for difference between health and disease. This work offers an urgent update to the model's scientific and philosophical foundations, providing a new and coherent account of causal interactions between the biological, the psychological and social.
Fifteen years have passed since the publication of a landmark issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology on qualitative and mixed methods research (Haverkamp et al., 2005), which signaled a ...methodological shift in counseling psychology and related fields. At the time, qualitative research was certainly less popular in the field and arguably less respected than it is now. This special issue charts advances in qualitative and mixed methods research since the publication of that issue, reflects on how these diverse approaches are conducted today, and points toward new methodological frontiers. The articles in this special issue include a range of methodological tools and theoretical perspectives that extend thinking about the ethics, practice, evaluation, and implications of psychological research. Notably, the articles are linked by a shared commitment to conducting psychological research critically-that is, to both critique dominant norms in the discipline and to sensitize psychological methods to power and inequality-and to advancing social justice. In this introduction, the guest editors survey authors' contributions and synthesize their insights to offer recommendations for future qualitative and mixed methods work in the field, particularly in terms of interdisciplinarity, methodological rigor, critical psychology, and social justice. They propose that counseling psychologists should cultivate a "qualitative imagination" with respect to all forms of empirical research (qualitative and quantitative) and offer specific guidance for enhancing methodological sophistication and sensitivity to power. Accordingly, this special issue is an important opportunity to set an agenda for the next decade-plus of critical inquiry in counseling psychology.
Public Significance Statement
This article introduces a special issue on qualitative and mixed methods research. The authors argue for the relevance of qualitative approaches for enhancing rigor and addressing important social issues across potentially all research methods.
The article draws from critical psychology to discuss the rising debate on brain determinism and free will in the legal domain. As free will also corresponds to the context and culture, it can have ...both the public and private space of expressions. The rise of neuroscience and its influence in the legal domain offers a holistic and sociocultural meaning of responsibility. Even one becomes entitled to take free will as a 'necessary illusion' in order to be in the zone of 'moral as well as legal-social life forming activities'. In the criminal justice system free will is not taken as any kind of 'necessary illusion' but the conscious will and action of the person. This further throw light on how the wilful control of any criminal act is a social act and our brain is not separate from our collective will.
Abstract
Community-based and participatory methods are often marginalized within institutions of power. In this article, we—a group of community advocates, lawyers, scholars, and researchers from ...across the globe including Thailand, India, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Italy, Iraq, Argentina, the UK, Puerto Rico, and the United States—have collectively gathered ways that community based, participatory legal empowerment research has been delegitimized across these contexts, and offer practical strategies to break out of this white supremacist colonial imagination and interrupt and respond to these instances of silencing and erasure. Our gatherings enable us to bring to life the rich particulars of each of our unique contexts and through this richness begin to see how larger dynamics span the globe. The micro illuminates the mechanics of the macro. This critical analysis that is possible in such a participatory space allowed us to identify these strategies of delegitimation that we were experiencing despite our very different positionalities and histories. These techniques of delegitimation fall into three broad themes: using traditional research as defence, attacking the credibility of communities including denying their humanity, and acts of self-invalidation. These techniques, whether enacted by donors, companies, government agencies, or academic institutions, seek to disempower the lived experiences of community members involved in legal empowerment. By cataloguing these experiences we hope to better understand techniques of silencing and oppression, and to trace the ways that systems of power reinforce their standing through these immediate and interpersonal responses to the voice of the collective.
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