Linda Morrison brings the voices and issues of a little-known, complex social movement to the attention of sociologists, mental health professionals, and the general public. The members of this social movement work to gain voice for their own experience, to raise consciousness of injustice and inequality, to expose the darker side of psychiatry, and to promote alternatives for people in emotional distress. Talking Back to Psychiatry explores the movement's history, its complex membership, its strategies and goals, and the (...) varied response it has received from psychiatry, policy makers, and the public at large. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Recognize the Person: Learning from Narratives of Psychiatric TreatmentLinda J. MorrisonTo know what patients endure at the hands of illness and therefore to be of clinical help requires that doctors enter the worlds of their patients, if only imaginatively, and to see and interpret these worlds from the patient’s point of view(Charon, 2006, p. 9).These narratives of psychiatric hospitalization are rich and evocative. We are fortunate to have (...) twelve descriptions appearing side-by-side, each unique in its focus, outlook, detail and narrative tone. Together their interwoven contexts describe personal and work relationships, internal and external help-seeking, encounters in community and hospital settings, and experiences of the psychiatric (psychiatrized) self as supplicant, victim, recipient, participant, product, and active agent over time (Morrison, 2005).Through their collected narratives, the authors create a distinct counterpoint to the more familiar clinical narratives of psychiatric encounters. Ordinarily the professional narrative drives interpretation of a clinical experience, whether medical or psychiatric. The caregivers populating these narratives would probably tell different stories, and the hospital notes and treatment records yet another (Hinsby & Baker, 2004; VanDerNagel et al., 2009). The disjunction between professional and patient narrative is especially true for psychiatric hospitalizations, in which the inpatient’s active narrative becomes a part of the diagnostic and treatment process (Steslow, 2010).In this symposium, the patient’s narrative is a window for interpretive insights into personal experience of the process. Each is a situated retrospective, in which added dimensions of feeling, thought and interaction provide the reader a fuller and more complex awareness of the experience of psychiatric hospitalization. The narratives provide insights about choice and agency, control and harm, safety and strength, hope and frustration, resilience and recovery, empathy and humanity; they also reveal various ethical issues related to the experience of help-seeking and treatment.It is vital to consider what each person wrote: what choices they made in representing their experience; what aspects they focused on, and what they (we imagine) left out. The authors used their own voices to create their own representations. In each narrative, “the person” provides an important standpoint. Who is this person, what is his or her experience? Where is the person in the situation; in what way does he or she appear to those who provide treatment or care? How, if at all, is the treatment pertinent to the person’s concerns? Does it feel helpful or harmful? How does the person find a way to continue, to push through, with the help of (or in spite of) those we hope are providing care? This is the first sign of agency, of choice, of “dreaming.” [End Page 35]As V. Barnard writes in Dreaming: A Recovery Story, “to make a film, one has to dream it first.” All of the authors in this symposium took the risk and the opportunity to create their own stories: what to include, what to leave out, how to tell what they wanted to say. These choices gave them the power to dream: how it was, how it might have been; how it felt, good and bad; the chance to represent their own reality—to themselves, and to unknown others (Morrison, 2006).Dreaming, Choice and Agency“My psychiatric illness is only one part of me. I am a person with hopes, dreams, love, an artist and a fellow helper of my peers.” V. BarnardV.’s narrative describes the potential for positive action, of dreaming herself as a whole into existence. Her themes of choice and agency emphasize the importance of autonomy and the capacity for autonomous action. On the farm, V. was free to choose and take risks, to take on responsibilities, to be “treated with respect as a human being trying to get better rather than a criminal suffering from something that was optional.” From disconnection, she was able to find connection, on her own terms.The support of peers adds a valuable dimension. Being recognized as a peer, a person who shares similar psychiatric experiences and respects the challenge of everyday life, brings another level to supportive relationships. Negative judgments and stigma are reduced by mutual support and acknowledgement of common goals. Mental health... (shrink)

Special volume of "Thaumàzein - Rivista di Filosofia" dedicated to the theme of Socratic Eudaimonia and care for others. It is a multilingual volume comprising twenty papers divided into six sections with an introduction by Linda Napolitano. Edited by Santiago Chame, Donald Morrison, and Linda Napolitano. -/- Despite the appearances given by certain texts, the moral psychology of Socrates needs not imply selfishness. On the contrary, a close look at passages in Plato and Xenophon (see Plato, Meno (...) 77-78; Protagoras 358; Gorgias 466-468; Euthydemus 278; Lysis 219; Xenophon, Memorabilia III 9, 4-5) suggests that the “egoist”’s welfare depends upon the welfare of others (i.e. family, friends or the whole city). Since the welfare of his family, friends and city is part of his own eudaimonìa, the “egoist” (phìlautos) has a direct and intrinsic motive to promote the welfare of these others. -/- This multilingual issue explores the role that other peoples’ welfare plays in Socratic ethics. Special attention is paid to test-cases in which the principle that moral action is always good only for the agent seems to have no validity. I.e., under which circumstances is the self-sacrifice for the sake of others (such as the soldier’s self-sacrifice on the battlefield) good for the agent (as in Alcibiades I 115a-116d)? Essays deal with contradictions or tensions of this sort, and relate them to more general views on eudaimonìa held within Socratic literature. Comparison between different Socratic authors is used as a means to identify the distinctive features of Socratic eudaimonìa if compared to other Greek theories of happiness, such as the Aristotelian theory of philautìa (NE IX, 1166a-1166b; 1168a-1169b). (shrink)

According to evolutionary theory, emotions are psychological mechanisms that have evolved to enhance fitness in specific situations by motivating appropriate (adaptive) behavior. Taking this perspective, a previous study examined the relationship between mood and preference for natural environments. It reported that participants’ anxiety level was associated with a preference for landscapes offering what Appleton called "refuge," while participants’ anger and cheerfulness were both associated with a preference for landscapes offering what Appleton called "prospect." We attempted to replicate these results and (...) to improve on the study by experimentally manipulating mood. Using a between-subjects design, 80 participants were instructed to self-induce one of four moods: anger, sadness, anxiety, or joy. After the mood induction, they viewed fourteen landscape photographs and recorded the seven most preferred. It was hypothesized that subjects experiencing anger or joy would prefer landscapes rich in "prospect" features, whereas participants experiencing sadness or anxiety would prefer landscapes rich in "refuge" features. In contrast to the previous study, the predictions were not supported: artificially induced moods may not provide ecological validity as a test of the "mood as motivator" model; alternatively, the first study may have reported an alpha error. To see whether the model has practical value, we recommend a study of landscape preference using participants with clinically significant levels of mood dysphoria. (shrink)

This book explores how the trans phenomenon can challenge the existing concept of the Self and its nature. The catalyst is Moore’s Paradox: can a trans person coherently state ‘I am a girl but I don’t believe that’? More deeply, three fundamental philosophical questions arise, of ontological, epistemological, and conceptual significance: what Self understands that the natal-gender is ‘wrong’? How does the trans person know that the natal-gender is ‘wrong’ and what counts as evidence? And finally, how does this effect (...) the concept of Self itself? Seeking answers, Brakel considers various theories of the Self, including classical accounts, modern views, and models developed by selected gender theorists. The book then takes a biological turn, first developing an evolutionary proper-function analysis of gender and trans-gender and subsequently proposing the possibility of a new ontological phenotype. With a review of cutting-edge neuroscientific research conducted over the last twenty-five years, Brakel propels this timely and important investigation toward the future, using experimental philosophy empirical studies adapted from classic thought experiments on the nature of the Self. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the prospect of compensation may render otherwise disproportionate harms proportionate. It argues that we should reject this possibility. Instead, it distinguishes duties of compensation as a requirement of rectificatory justice from a harm’s degree of compensability, and argues that only the latter is relevant to proportionality. On this view, failing to compensate constitutes a distinct wrong, while harms that are not adequately compensable carry extra weight in proportionality calculations. This explains how the prospect of compensation affects (...) permissions to harm, without relying on the dubious assumption that disproportionate harms may be rendered proportionate by future compensation. (shrink)

I use an old challenge to motivate a new view. The old challenge is due to variation in our perceptions of secondary qualities. The challenge is to say whose perceptions are accurate. The new view is about how we manage to perceive secondary qualities, and thus manage to perceive them accurately or inaccurately. I call it perceptual structuralism. I first introduce the challenge and point out drawbacks with traditional responses. I spend the rest of the paper motivating and defending a (...) structuralist response. While I focus on color, both the challenge and the view generalize to the other secondary qualities. (shrink)

Morrison and Morgan argue for a view of models as 'mediating instruments' whose role in scientific theorising goes beyond applying theory. Models are partially independent of both theories and the world. This autonomy allows for a unified account of their role as instruments that allow for exploration of both theories and the world.

From the ethics perspective, “duty of care” is a difficult and contested term, fraught with misconceptions and apparent misappropriations. However, it is a term that clinicians use frequently as they navigate COVID-19, somehow core to their understanding of themselves and their obligations, but with uncertainty as to how to translate or operationalize this in the context of a pandemic. This paper explores the “duty of care” from a legal perspective, distinguishes it from broader notions of duty on professional and personal (...) levels, and proposes a working taxonomy for practitioners to better understand the concept of “duty” in their response to COVID-19. (shrink)

The last twenty-five years or so of thought about tort law have been remarkably productive and dynamic, as the dominance of the law and economics model has been challenged by theories that reintroduce the language of corrective justice. Over this same time period, theorizing about corrective justice has sprung up in response to a wide range of social, political and moral issues. I have in mind work on restorative theories in criminal justice; on postwar justice; on truth commissions, political reconciliation (...) and transitional justice in contexts of regime change; on official apologies as responses to international crises, institutionalized abuse and historical injustices; and on interpersonal apology, the making of amends, and forgiveness as responses to everyday moral transgressions. In these writings, theorists explore what people owe to one another in the aftermath of various kinds of wrongdoing, and thereby subtly challenge our ideas about what should be included under the heading of corrective justice. One new strand of thought, which appears in many of these debates, suggests that corrective justice requires a form of reconciliation or relational repair. My goal in this chapter is to introduce this idea and explore what it might offer to the philosophy of tort law. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays by leading women in philosophy. It provides a glimpse at the experiences of the generation that witnessed, and helped create, the remarkable advances now evident for women in the field.

Spinoza’s claims about true ideas are central to the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. It is therefore worth trying to reconstruct what he means when he says that an idea is true. I argue that the three leading interpretations – correspondence, coherence, and causal – don’t explain key passages. I then propose a new interpretation. Roughly, I propose that an idea is true if and only if it represents an essence and was derived in the right kind of (...) way by the intellect from an innate idea of one’s own essence. In the final section I sketch why I believe this interpretation extends to his claims about truth and adequacy in the Ethics. (shrink)

While pharmaceutical industry involvement in producing, interpreting, and regulating medical knowledge and practice is widely accepted and believed to promote medical innovation, industry-favouring biases may result in prioritizing corporate profit above public health. Using diabetes as our example, we review successive changes over forty years in screening, diagnosis, and treatment guidelines for type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, which have dramatically expanded the population prescribed diabetes drugs, generating a billion-dollar market. We argue that these guideline recommendations have emerged under pervasive industry (...) influence and persisted, despite weak evidence for their health benefits and indications of serious adverse effects associated with many of the drugs they recommend. We consider pharmaceutical industry conflicts of interest in some of the research and publications supporting these revisions, and in related standard-setting committees and oversight panels. We raise concern over the long-term impact of these multifaceted involvements. Rather than accept industry conflicts of interest as normal, needing only to be monitored and managed, we suggest challenging that normalcy, and ask: what are the real costs of tolerating such industry participation? We urge the development of a broader focus to fully understand and curtail the systemic nature of industry’s influence over medical knowledge and practice. (shrink)

This volume explores a central paradox in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought and practice and the ways in which they were used.

This article describes the work of negotiating and reinterpreting "standard" protocols and criteria at the level of local practice, using the example of the procurement of human cadaver organs for transplantation. The tension between efforts to starulardize and globalize biomedical science, on the one hand, and fitting these efforts into everyday practices and understandings of practitioners, on the other, results in new constructions of medical knowledge about bodies and persons.

The meaning of dignity in health care has been primarily explored using interviews and surveys with various patient groups, as well as with health care practitioners. Philosophical analysis of dignity is largely avoided, as the existing philosophical literature is complex, multifaceted and of unclear relevance to health care settings. The aim of this paper is to develop a straightforward philosophical concept of dignity which is then applied to existing qualitative research. In health care settings, a patient has dignity when he (...) or she is able to live in accordance with his or her standards and values. Accordingly, health care practitioners respect a patient's dignity when they refrain from transgressing the patient's standards and values, or refrain from forcing the patient to transgress his or her standards and values. This concept is shown to explain and illuminate most of the key qualitative findings. It therefore provides a more coherent and synthesised concept of dignity in health care. (shrink)

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6. Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group were able to produce six types of them; children at (...) 4 years old experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns. (shrink)

The statistical interpretation introduced by Born in mid-1926 is not the interpretation now associated with his name. Born's own understanding of that interpretation is revealed by looking at some of its roots in Born's earlier work with Franck on collisions, his collaboration with Jordan on that topic, his contributions to matrix mechanics, his attempt in collaboration with Wiener at an operator formulation of quantum mechanics, and at the exposition of the interpretation in Born's first papers on a wave mechanical treatment (...) of collisions. (shrink)

This a collection of contemporary popular and scholarly writing on the subject of sexual harassment. The book is designed to clarify and enrich understanding of a topic that in recent years, especially in the United States, has been the subject of contentious debate in the media, the law, and the academy. The book's variety of political analysis, legal theory, philosophical debate, multicultural and international perspectives, regulatory documents, and Supreme Court case law is unprecedented in any single volume on the subject.

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds (...) to these essays. (shrink)

How do we perdure when we and everything around us are caught up in incessant change? But the course of this change does not seem to be haphazard and we may seek the modalities of its Logos in the transformations in which it occurs. The classic term "Metamorphosis" focuses upon the proportions between the transformed and the retained, the principles of sameness and otherness. Applied to life and its becoming, metamorphosis pinpoints the proportions between the vital and the aesthetic significance (...) of life. Where could this metaphysical in-between territory come better to light than in the Fine Arts? In this collection are investigated the various proportions between the vital significance of the constructivism of life and a specifically human contribution made by the creative imagination to the transformatory search for beauty and aesthetic values. Papers by: Lawrence Kimmel, Mark L. Brack, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, William Roberts, Jadwiga Smith, Victor Gerald Rivas, Max Statkiewicz, Matti Itkonen, George R. Tibbetts, Linda Stratford, Jorella Andrews, Ingeborg M. Rocker, Stephen J. Goldberg, Leah Durner, Donnalee Dox, Catherine Schear, Samantha Henriette Krukowski, Gary Maciag, Kelly Dennis, Wanda Strukus, Magda Romanska, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Ellen Burns, Tessa Morrison, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Gary Backhaus, Daniel M. Unger, Howard Pearce. (shrink)

Finding solutions to complex health problems, such as obesity, violence, and climate change, will require radical changes in cross-disciplinary education, research, and practice. The fundamental determinants of health include many interrelated factors such as poverty, culture, education, environment, and government policies. However, traditional public health training has tended to focus more narrowly on diseases and risk factors, and has not adequately leveraged the rich contributions of sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, communication, political science, and other disciplines. Further, students are often not (...) sufficiently trained to work across sectors to translate research findings into effective, large-scale sustainable actions. During the past 2 decades, national and international organizations have called for more effective interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and translational approaches to graduate education. Although it has been difficult to work across traditional academic boundaries, some promising models draw on pedagogical theory and feature cross-disciplinary training focused on real-world problems, linkage between research, professional practice, community action, and cultivation of leadership skills. We describe the development the Doctor of Public Health program at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and its efforts to improve transdisciplinary and translational research education. We stress the need for international collaboration to improve educational approaches and better evaluate their impact. (shrink)

In Life's Dominion Ronald Dworkin argues that disagreement over the morality ofabortion is about how best to respect the intrinsic value of human life, rather than about foetal rights as many people mistakenly suppose. Dworkin argues that the state should be neutral indebates about intrinsic value and thus it should be neutral in the abortion debate. Through a consideration of the notion of intrinsic value, it is argued in this article that Dworkin'sargument fails. On the interpretation of which Dworkin seems (...) to favour, it is shown to be implausible that such a notion accounts for different views about the value of human life. On an alternative interpretation of it is argued that the state is not usually neutral on such matters, and thus there is no reason why it should be in the case of abortion. (shrink)

History education holds strong potential for students to examine how racism and other intersecting forms of oppression embedded within U.S. institutions have and still impact today’s social fabric. When rooted in Martell and Stevens’ “thinking like an activist” framework, history education provides opportunities for preservice teachers (PSTs) to see, understand, and disrupt the dominant narrative. They can begin to reimagine their roles as future leaders in the classroom and beyond to ensure that all students thrive and not just survive. Thus, (...) for this qualitative study, we engaged our PST in a book study of A Different Mirror for Young People: A History for Multicultural America. Through intentional content and pedagogical choices, we investigated the question, “ How do preservice teachers make sense of history using the ‘thinking like an activist’ framework?” Findings indicated how Takaki’s different mirror, as a counternarrative centering the perspectives and experiences of historically marginalized groups, allowed PSTs 1) to unlearn oppressive structures (cultural preparation), 2) begin to develop a sociopolitical consciousness of systemic oppression, albeit through an outsider’s perspective (critical analysis), and 3) to analyze how collective action in the past enacted change–although through an already, but not yet, understanding of their role in social change in the present (collective action). (shrink)

The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing (...) in what seems “a moral void” , or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife. In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathen-filled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane “preyere” to “delivere us out of al this bisy drede” in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child , removing what seems the only obstacle to complete “felicitee” in the realm. (shrink)

Empirical studies that have attempted to describe nurses' ethical practice have used conceptual frameworks derived primarily from the disciplines of bioethics and psychology. These frameworks have not incorporated important concepts developed by nursing theorists over the past two decades. This article points out flaws in the past research frameworks and proposes a synthesis of ethical theory, nursing practice contexts, and empirical research methods to enrich theoretical development in nursing ethics. Keywords: ethics, ethics studies, nursing, theory development CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's (...) this? (shrink)

Feminist theory and reflections on sexuality and gender rarely make contact with contemporary continental philosophy of religion. Where they all come together, creative and transformative thinking occurs. In Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, internationally recognized scholars tackle complicated questions provoked by the often stormy intersection of these powerful forces. The essays in this book break down barriers as they extend the richness of each philosophical tradition. They discuss topics such as queer sexuality and religion, feminism and the gift, (...) feminism and religious reform, and religion and diversity. The contributors are Hélène Cixous, Sarah Coakley, Kelly Brown Douglas, Mark D. Jordan, Catherine Keller, Saba Mahmood, and Gianni Vattimo. (shrink)