Overview of the impact of culture on mental health: the importance of meaning and hope Philip Thomas...
-
Upload
abbie-jordon -
Category
Documents
-
view
214 -
download
0
Transcript of Overview of the impact of culture on mental health: the importance of meaning and hope Philip Thomas...
Overview of the impact of culture on mental health: the importance of
meaning and hope
Philip ThomasProfessor of Philosophy Diversity & Mental HealthInternational School for Communities Rights and
InclusionUniversity of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HEU.K.
Outline of talk1. What do we mean by ‘culture’.2. Describe recent changes in how we think about
culture and the relationship between culture and identity.
3. Outline the cultural origins and assumptions of technological psychiatry as a way of understanding madness.
4. Examine the limitations of technological psychiatry in understanding madness and distress.
5. Examine how culture and meaning are central to understanding madness.
What is culture? 1 - Content
1. Language, custom and tradition2. Belief, faith and spirituality3. Values and morals4. Art, literature, music: aesthetics5. History and place
What is culture? 2 - Functions
1. Culture is that aspect of our shared humanity that:a. binds us together andb. creates human difference and diversity.
2. Through the particularity of history and geography, culture binds us to existential time and space.
3. In this way, culture is a key determinant of personal identity – who I am as a person.
4. Culture constitutes the referrents, signs and symbols that bring meaning into our lives.
Increasing Complexity of ‘Culture’
1.Migration and Mobility2.The media and new information
technology3.The end of colonialism4.The crisis of modernity
Cultural Psychiatry in a Creolizing World: Questions for a New Research Agenda.
Bibeau, G. (1997) Transcultural Psychiatry, 34, 9 - 41.
"... the enterprise of the age of reason, gaining authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, was to criticise, condemn and crush whatever its protagonists considered to be foolish or unreasonable.... And all that was so labelled could be deemed inimical to society or the state - indeed could be regarded as a menace to the proper workings of an orderly, efficient, progressive, rational society"
(Porter, 1987, pgs 14-15).
Psychiatry and the European Enlightenment
Importance of reasonFocus on Self
Need for a reasonable society
Emergence of Technological
thinking
Preoccupation with ‘depth’ and
‘interiority’
Exclusion of ‘unreason’
Technological approaches
Discourses of interior
Quest for ‘individual truth’
Psychiatry
Great confinement
Figure 1 in Postpsychiatry, Bracken, P. & Thomas, P. (2005:7)
HAD Scale Scoring SheetName: ________________________________ Date:___/___/______This questionnaire is designed to help your advisor to know how you feel. Read each item and place a firm tick in the box opposite the reply which comes closest to how you have been feeling in the past week.
Don’t take too long over your replies: your immediate reaction to each item will probably be more accurate than a long thought out response.
Tick only one box in each section
I feel tense or ‘wound up’: I feel as if I am slowed down: A D
Most of the time3
Nearly all the time3
A lot of the time 2 Very often 2
Time to time/occasionally
1 Sometimes 1
Not at all 0 Not at all 0
"…man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning."
(Geertz, 1973:5)
Bracken, P. & Thomas, P. (2005) Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Lapsley, H., Nikora, L. & Black, R. (2002) Kia Mauri Tau!: Narratives of Recovery from Disabling Mental Health Problems. Report of the University of Waikito Mental Health Narratives Project. Mental Health Commission, Wellington NZ, Accessed 28/20/04 at http://www.mhc.govt.nz/publications/2002/Kia_Mauri_Tau.pdf 2004.Onken, S., Dumont, J., Ridgway, P., Dornan, D. & Ralph, R. (2002) Mental Health Recovery: What Helps and What Hinders? A National Research Project for the development of Recovery Facilitating System Performance Indicators. National Technical Assistance Center for State Mental Health Planning, National Association of State Mental Health Programme Directors, USA. Accessed 04/11/03 http://www.nasmhpd.org/general_files/publications/ntac_pubs/reports/MHSIPReport.pdfTooth, B., Kalyanasundaram, V., Glover, H. & Momenzadah, S. (2003) Factors consumers identify as important to recovery from schizophrenia. Australasian Psychiatry, 11 (supplement) 70 – 77.Topor, A. (2001) Managing the Contradictions: Recovery from Severe Mental Disorders. Stockholm Studies of Social Work, 18. Stockholm, Stockholm University Press.Thornhill, H., Clare, L. & May, R. (2004) Escape, Enlightenment and Endurance: Narratives of recovery from psychosis. Anthropology and Medicine, 11, 181 – 199.