nursingforsocialjustice

Here’s my ethical crisis for today:

Yesterday I attended a virtual discussion panel on discrimination in healthcare. My thoughts throughout this conference: the entire system that we call psychiatry is based on American Psychological Association (APA) standards of what is normal. And, within this we really have to understand who is producing the research that informed such a diagnostic manual. We also have to really understand the role of psychiatry in individualizing problems that are sometimes (often?) based on human reactions to social injustices, or problems created, nurtured and grown within an environment of social injustice. And, instead of addressing the larger social justice issue, it gets boiled down to an individual issue, and the solution is to teach the individual how to adapt better to the injustice that they encounter every day in their lives. These are not novel revelations that I invented. The idea that mental illness is context bound and is influenced by other social forces like racism and poverty are not groundbreaking. But that does not mean that have been warmly embraced by the medical community. Existence of a critical perspective is not equal to systems change. And, the not newness of these different view does not make them any less relevant today than they have been in the past. Remember that time we thought that forward moving progress just happened? Well…let’s re-think that.

We need to take a bigger, deeper look at this and try to more clearly understand how conceptualization of normal and processes of normalization are not helping some (many?) people in these services that we sometimes call psychiatry and sometimes call mental health.

Letting business solutions drive health care practices and removing the care that should be driving the practices. We have to think about big tech, the decisions that are being made by corporations and categories within databases that are not reflective of reality.

Love,

Michelle D.