Scholarship in neuroethics and related disciplines has long reflected on the value of different conceptual models of disability and impairment. While this theoretical work is valuable, centering the voices of people with mental health conditions in neuroethics research can help us better understand how such models apply in everyday people’s lives. Drawing on qualitative data from a study on mental health peer providers’ lived experiences of recovery, this paper will demonstrate that peers borrow from both a neurodiversity framework and the (...) medical model of disability, though their feelings toward the two models were often complex and ambivalent. These findings advance neuroethics by indicating that future research and clinical practice should take a nuanced approach to responding to the needs of people with mental health conditions and turn to peers as experts, honoring their values and recognizing both the promise and pitfalls of living with a mental health condition. (shrink)

As the number of medical and health humanities degree programs in the United States rapidly increases, it is especially timely to consider the range of specific disciplinary perspectives that might benefit students enrolled in these programs. This paper discusses the inclusion of one such perspective from the field of Science and Technology Studies The author asserts that STS benefits students in the medical and health humanities in four particular ways, by: challenging the “progress narrative” around the advancement of biomedicine as (...) scientific practice, evaluating the meaning of technology, especially in how technology orients us towards sickness and how health technology is in turn shaped by social and cultural values, assessing the plurality of biomedical epistemologies, rather than assuming biomedicine is one, cohesive body of knowledge that does not differ across contexts, and critiquing bias in biomedical practice and science, especially in the marginalization of women’s voices and in the racial and postcolonial trajectories of contemporary biomedicine. The paper discusses the theoretical importance of these four trajectories to the medical and health humanities, as well as the venues for inclusion of STS within coursework and programming at Case Western Reserve University. The paper also comments on how programming at other institutions might be adapted to incorporate STS scholarship. By drawing on numerous examples of research in the anthropology, sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, this article seeks to open a conversation about the value of science and technology studies to health humanities pedagogy. (shrink)

Physicians are trained to an expert degree in the scientific knowledge and skills of biomedicine. Despite this training, however, physicians’ professional lives are rife with instances in which they do not know. They must operate adeptly in the face of numerous uncertainties, as the extensiveness of the scientific literature, unknown mechanisms of pharmaceuticals or biological processes, and variations in patients’ etiologies and anatomies render it impossible to know everything. Similarly, physicians study vast swaths of scientific concepts and clinical skills throughout (...) their careers, yet individual physicians cannot commit all that biomedical knowledge to memory. Given the impossibility of absolute knowledge... (shrink)