Thanks! I am still reading, and I enjoyed that.

I am part of a few feminist online communities, and some of them have made 
an effort to not stigmatize mental health conditions and to gently correct 
people when they do. This seems to come up when discussing the news. For 
example, with the recent situation with the South Carolina governor's affair 
and trip to Argentina, some members of the community were speculating 
whether or not he was bipolar, and were using it almost as a humorous insult 
to criticize his behavior. Members of the community, including at least one 
who is diagnosed bipolar, came forward and complained openly about such 
attacks as a stigmitization of mental health conditions. Also, frequently 
when people casually call people they disapprove of "nuts","crazy", 
"mentally ill", or something along those lines, these comments are also 
discouraged quickly by the community.

Hilary Gerber


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 3:09 AM
Subject: Re: mental health ethics


>I think this list is in a summer slumber but hopefully there are still some 
>reading:
>
> This past month I taught a graduate course in health ethics for a master's 
> of health administration program.  One of my own areas of specialization 
> is mental health ethics, which includes the ethics of psychiatric 
> diagnosis and treatment.  I have worked in community organizations for 
> people with severe problems in living (e.g. "schizophrenia", and victims 
> of religious and political persecution) and have presented papers at 
> conferences on human rights and mental health.  When I went to look for 
> materials to use in the course I was surprised by the assumption in many 
> health ethics articles, some included in health ethics/bioethics 
> textbooks, of the inherent validity or "healthiness" of psychiatric 
> diagnosis and delineation, with examples of people in a "europhic or 
> morbid phase" of "bipolar" or having values warped or compromised by "a 
> severe psychiatric illness."  Deleterious images of people who are 
> addicted to heavy drugs also abound.  These kinds of perspectives, in my 
> opinion, are harmful to the health interests of those who have been 
> unfortunate enough to fall into continual psychiatric attention and 
> stigmatization, such as people with very poor or noxious networks of 
> support and sufferers of chronic trauma or victimization.
>
> I do worry about harms falling on psychiatric users with the teaching of 
> articles to health care professionals and administrators that present 
> uncritically "the findings" of psychiatry.  There are pervasive 
> destructive assumptions that 1) severe problems in living are primarily 
> psychological, biological, and genetic--thoroughly personal--in nature, 
> rather than primarily informed by relational/social/cultural factors, and 
> 2) that mental illness and mental competence are diametrically opposed to 
> each other (usually people don't see something like chronic backache, 
> arthritis, diabetes, or itchy skin as necessarily or as a matter of course 
> posing a threat to mental competence and proficiency). Health care 
> ethicists have embraced the notion that physical disability is socially 
> constructed, though the notion that mental health disability is socially 
> constructed has been less accepted it seems, though there has been some 
> helpful work on mild-moderate depression and an excellent anthology by 
> Fulford, Dickenson and Murray--"Healthcare Ethics and Human Values." 
> Sometimes this can be because of a conflict of interest, where health care 
> ethicists are friends and colleagues of psychiatrists; I have known a few 
> health care ethicists in this conflict.   But I hope feminist health care 
> ethicists can help more with this problem.  I am hoping to write more on 
> this topic this summer.  In the meantime, if people are wanting to be 
> sensitive to this issue in their own writing or anthology editing, I would 
> be happy to give input from my grass roots experience.
>
> Thanks for reading, Andrea Nicki
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> GameVault: Play free online games at Gamevault.ca. Word arcade, puzzle and 
> more. Play now!
> http://www.gamevault.ca/?icid=AOLGAM00310000000001