nursingforsocialjustice

It is strange, I think, when we assume the persona of someone in a professional role, and make a valiant (arrogant?) attempt to cognitively bracket out pieces of ourselves. What if those pieces of ourselves are what help us connect with our patients? My biggest critique (at this moment) of the mental health system is that we (the Royal we, the clinician we) actively perpetuate stigma, as defined by Erving Goffman, by continually engaging in this process of objectifying patients, reinforcing an “us” and “them”, so much so that it has become the scaffolding of the system. Objectivity is good. Subjectivity is bad. But…what isn’t subjective? Conventions like writing “writer observed” and using “patient” instead of someone’s name, or putting one’s recollection of a conversation in quotation marks doesn’t make something more objective. It’s not like patients have an equal chance to contribute to the clinical documentation, it’s not like we engage in a process of member checking after we write stuff on a chart, not in any mental health setting I have practiced in.

I am not sure how collaborative relationships are built within a system that is structured around the powerful and the powerless. I am not sure how healing happens in environments in which policy and practice is built on definitions of safety that are synonymous with risk management and fail to even acknowledge the coercive practice and othering stitched into the fabric of the cloth holding together the system. How do we even begin to address any of these issues without acknowledging the need to dismantle the system and start over?

I have a lot of love for people who are different, who do not quite fit in, people who are socially awkward, people who are the underdog. I was that kid. I was the kid that other kids would bark at and call a beast because I shaved my head and wore stockings on my arms underneath my Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. I was the kid that had a million existential crisis and was over high school by the time I was half way through through it. I was the kid who left my house on Friday morning to go to school and didn’t come back until Sunday night. I wrote bad poetry and was somehow the weirdo of high school band. I was the kid who’s parent wrote then a note that they were allowed to smoke on overnight school trips, and, back in the 1990s, I did. I turned out okay. No one forced me to be like anyone else, like everyone else. That’s how it should be, no? If we really mean we are person centred and strengths based?

Love,

Michelle D.