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2012, Studies in Social Justice
As advancements are made through processes of social inclusion, disability justice frameworks have emerged to query the limits of rights-based and incorporation strategies by revealing how such practices sustain systems of oppression. Indeed, disability justice has shown how inclusion models position “exclusion” as the problem in need of redress, leaving larger structural issues of inequity unchallenged. Positioned within the larger field of critical disability studies, mad studies scholars and activists are beginning to reevaluate the consequences of what it means to participate in regimes of power, as we now must deal with what results from being included and recognized by the political apparatuses and technologies that not only manage disability but also produce and sustain it. Here I show how the inclusion of peer support workers within dominant mental health service systems is an emerging form of affective labor, which can help orient service users toward feelings and emotions that actually cooperate with psy regimes of governance.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
The Recovery Narrative: Politics and Possibilities of a Genre2019 •
Recovery is now widely acknowledged as the dominant approach to the management of mental distress and illness in government, third-sector and some peer-support contexts across the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the Anglophone Global North. Although narrative has long been recognised in practice and in policy as a key “technology of recovery,” there has been little critical investigation of how recovery narratives are constituted and mobilised, and with what consequences. This paper offers an interdisciplinary, critical medical humanities analysis of the politics and possibilities of Recovery Narrative, drawing literary theoretical concepts of genre and philosophical approaches to the narrative self into conversation with the critiques of recovery advanced by survivor-researchers, sociologists and mad studies scholars. Our focus is not on the specific stories of individuals, but on the form, function and effects of Recovery Narrative as a highly circumscribed kind of storytelling. We identify the assumptions, lacunae and areas of tension which compel a more critical approach to the way this genre is operationalised in and beyond mental health services, and conclude by reflecting on the possibilities offered by other communicative formats, spaces and practices.
Studies in Social Justice
Recovering our Stories: A Small Act of ResistanceThis paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient personal story. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having lived experience has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from agents of change towards one of disability tourism or patient porn. We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool fo...
Disability & Society
The mental health peer worker as informant: Performing authenticity and the paradoxes of passing2019 •
The inclusion imperative in community care means that disabled people are now increasingly being employed as peer workers in the service systems that manage them. This article offers a timely inquiry into the role of the peer worker in mental health and homeless service sectors. Using ethnography and in-depth qualitative interviews with fellow peer workers, I explore the paradoxical nature of new expectations for peer ‘authenticity,’ and the ways in which peer workers learn to manage the requirement to perform identity in our work roles. This analysis thus denaturalizes peer identity, and works to develop possibilities for doing disability identity-based work differently.
This paper offers a theoretical exploration on the value of harnessing ‘people with lived experience of mental health issues’ as an identity category to promote mental health social justice change. I engage longstanding feminist, postcolonial, and post-structural philosophical debates that have queried the possibilities, limits, and conditions of drawing on experience as expertise, and apply these debates to show what can happen when we rely on strategic essentialism under the rubric of ‘lived experience’ to authorize our power. By doing so, I attend to how essentialized notions of lived experience risk effacing the material, ontological and epistemological differences among us that matter, and what such universalism can produce when we engage in research and knowledge production as ‘people with lived experience.’
Journal of Ethics in Mental Health
Constituting “Lived Experience” Discourses in Mental Health: The Ethics of Racialized Identification/Representation and the Erasure of Intergeneration Colonial Violence2019 •
The term “lived experience” has been used widely in mental health literature and research to claim a proximity to authority and authenticity in relation to voice and identity. Through an examination of literature from the perspectives of Critical Mental Health, Mad Studies, and Critical Disability Studies, “people with lived experience” discourses are contested for perpetuating social relations of white supremacy. The ethics of “lived experience” discourses are questioned for their role in (re)positioning of modernistic ideas of experience and Eurocentric systems of identification as dominant. “Lived experience” in mental health research is often understood as inseparably connected to those who have used or been coerced by Western models of mental health services, often those specifically formed by or with biomedical psychiatry. This omits appreciations of the over-criminalization and dehumanization of racialized people and indigenous peoples who struggle with distress and suffering. Racialized and indigenous peoples often find themselves at the mercy of criminal justice and immigration systems, while mental health services are differentially accessed or imposed. Mental health for racialized and indigenous peoples is often referenced to support prosecution, to establish threat, risk, biomedical inferiority, and ideas of dangerousness. While contributions from Mad Studies and Critical Disability Studies have helped many to appreciate the value of the voices of those who have experienced the effects of services and systems, the ethics of self-identification alongside systemic and structural analyses of identification/representation for racialized and indigenous peoples are often inadequate. The divergent identification/representation processes, practices, and technologies that essentialize criminality, alienism, and biological inferiority for racialized and indigenous peoples are analyzed through an attention to the erasure and devaluing of the repercussions of intergeneration colonial violence and subjugation. An appreciation of identity and experience as a social, historical, and political confluence is offered as an ethical response to the technologies of identification/representation that order hierarchies of voice and agency and attempt to silence ongoing practices of racist and eugenic colonial violence.
Social Work Education the International Journal
Social Work Education Service-user narratives in social work education; Co-production or co-option2020 •
As a social work lecturer I have, over the years, developed strong links with service-user/survivor groups in an effort to contribute to a more context-focused and democratic approach to mental health education and practice. User narratives of psychiatric survival have been central in organizing resistance toward dominant constructions of ‘mental illness’. Within education, user narratives have created spaces for co-production with a transformative potential, as traditionally silenced voices can be heard and affirmed. However, recent debates suggest that such narratives are often used by mental health and educational systems to promote their own agendas. In this context, user narratives are no longer considered a transformative act of co-production or resistance. They are a commodity servicing primarily the interests of these systems. This paper adds to these debates through a self-reflexive discussion on my experience of including user/survivor narratives in Irish social work education, as user narratives remain insufficiently critiqued in this context. I consider the significance of power operations in the contexts where narratives are shared and heard and argue for the need to honor what has been achieved while problematizing what may be lost through the inclusion of service-user narratives in social work education. KEYWORDS: Mental health, service-users, narratives, co-production, co-option
This paper considers possible epistemologies for user-led and survivor research by drawing on four discourses: the mainstream English tradition, Canadian Mad Studies, critical theory more generally and feminist standpoint epistemology. It discusses general, universalising epistemologies, the extent to which these characterise the discourses at stake and the problems with knowledge claims that rest on such singular conceptualisations. The institutional and political concomitants are considered. The paper has an additional double aim: to engage with survivor scholarship around critical theory and to insert that scholarship into the field of critical theory itself in a novel manner.
Frontiers in Sociology
Power, Privilege and Knowledge: the Untenable Promise of Co-production in Mental "Health"2019 •
This paper examines the concept and practice of coproduction in mental health. By analyzing personal experience as well as the historical antecedents of coproduction, we argue that the site of coproduction is defined by the legacy of the Enlightenment and its notions of "reason" and "the cognitive subject." We show the enduring impact of these notions in producing and perpetuating the power dynamics between professionals, researchers, policy makers and service users within privileged sites of knowledge production, whereby those deemed to lack reason-the mad and the racialized mad in particular-and their knowledge are radically inferiorised. Articulating problems in what is considered knowledge and methods of knowing, we argue that modern "psy" sciences instantiates the privilege of reason as well as of whiteness. We then examine how the survivor movement, and the emergent survivor/mad knowledge base, duplicates white privilege even as it interrogates privileges of reason and cognition. Describing how we grapple with these issues in an ongoing project-EURIKHA-which aims to map the knowledge produced by service users, survivors and persons with psychosocial disabilities globally, we offer some suggestions. Coproduction between researchers, policy makers and those of us positioned as mad, particularly as mad people of color, we argue, cannot happen in knowledge production environments continuing to operate within assumptions and philosophies that privilege reason as well as white, Eurocentric thinking. We seek not to coproduce but to challenge and change thinking and support for psychosocial suffering in contexts local to people's lives.
Who's Talking About Us Without Us? A Survivor Research Interjection into an Academic Psychiatry Debate on Compulsory Community Treatment Orders in Ireland
Who's Talking About Us Without Us? A Survivor Research Interjection into an Academic Psychiatry Debate on Compulsory Community Treatment Orders in Ireland2019 •
This paper presents a user/survivor researcher perspective to the debate among psychiatrists on the suggested introduction of Community Treatment Orders in Ireland. Critical questions are raised about evidence and the construction of psychiatric knowledge. Important questions include: How is this evidence created? What and whose knowledge have not been considered? Some critical issues around coercion, ‘insight’, and attributions of ‘lack of capacity’ are briefly considered. Further legal considerations are then introduced based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability. The paper concludes with a human rights-based appeal to reject the introduction of coercive community treatment in Ireland.
Social Work in Mental Health
Un/helpful help and its discontents: Peer researchers paying attention to street life narratives to inform social work policy and practice2014 •
Journal of Ethics in Mental Health
Disordering Social Inclusion: Ethics, Critiques, Collaborations, Futurities2019 •
International Political Sociology
Victims or Madmen? The Diagnostic Competition over “Terrorist” Detainees at Guantánamo Bay2007 •
Social Theory & Health
Tactical Authenticity in the Production of Autoethnographic Mad Narratives2019 •
Journal of Ethics in Mental Health
Shades of silence: Doing mental health research as an ‘insider’2019 •
Values and Ethics in Mental Health: An Exploration for Practice
Power, knowledge and personal narratives2015 •
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
Mobilizing Mad Art in the Neoliberal University Resisting Regulatory Efforts by Inscribing Art as Political PracticeSecurity Dialogue
Sovereignty, Security, Psychiatry: Liberation and the Failure of Mental Health Governance in Iraq2010 •
Disability & Society, 30:1, 153-157
Between exclusion and colonisation: seeking a place for mad people’s knowledge in academia2014 •
'Distress or Disability', based on symposium at Lancaster University, 15-16th November 2011.
Live and Let Die; Global Mental Health and Critical Disability StudiesGlobal Studies of Childhood
Troubling the 'troubled teen' industry: Adult reflections on youth experiences of therapeutic boarding schools2020 •
Disability and Society
"He see patients as lesser people": Exploring mental health service users' critiques and appraisals of psychiatrists in Canada2019 •
Dissertation, Carleton University
Stories of Madness: Exploring Resistance, Conformity, Resiliency, Agency, and Disengagement in Mental Health Narratives2019 •
In Ben-Moshe, L., Chapman, C. and Carey, A. (eds.) Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in US and Canada.
Chapman, C., Ben-Moshe, L. & Carey, A. C. (2014) Reconsidering confinement: Interlocking locations and logics of confinement.2014 •