Why is disability understood as a problem that resides in the individual? Why is the disabled individual such a problem for society? What kinds of individuals are valued by contemporary society? Why might some people find it hard or unhelpful to identify as a disabled person? How have social and human sciences contribute to common sense and everyday of what it means to be an individual? The ‘individual’ has a long socio-political history and etymology. It is tied to the enlightenment rise of the reasoned individual and his democracy, over the sovereignty of church and monarchy. The ‘individual’ is also the creation of capitalism, a convenient signifier of an alienating symbolic order, which masks the inequities of social and political life. And individuals populate consumerist and marketised forms of education, work and leisure. Those able to benefit from this meritocracy flourish. The less able tend to flounder. In dominant ideas of everyday life, the ‘individual’ remains the key site of understanding for the aetiology of disablism. When we think of the disabled individual, of a disabled person, what frames of reference do we draw on to judge that personhood? What do we mean by the ‘individual’? Dominant discourses in society constitute disability as the absolute alterity — the liminal state that marks the discursive edges of humanity (Erevelles, 2005: 424). But what is the alterity for disabled people? If we are to turn the tables: what Other are disabled people expected to judge themselves against and what Others can be offered as alternatives?
Over the past decade Guy has facilitated a range of community-based groups under the title ‘psychology in the real world’. These have been open to anyone who wants to come along but have proven of interest to many people who have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, manic depressive, clinically depressed and personality disordered and who have received a vast array of therapies and treatments, some of which they have found helpful, many of which have been experienced as harmful. The groups critique all theories that purport to explain why people struggle in life; participants leave having let go of or taken on board various explanations that might attempt to look at the causes, and the causes of causes, of distress. Many of these groups have been co-facilitated with people with long histories of involvement in psychiatric services.
They have included: ‘Understanding Ourselves and Others’; the ‘Black Dog’; ‘Toxic Mental Environments’; and ‘Thinking about Medication’. Guy’s talk will explore how to set up community-based groups of this type, their power for de-medicalising distress, and how people can set up the kinds of groups that they feel might meet the needs of people caught up in the psy-complex.
Until about the mid 1980s political refugees and asylum-seekers were essentially seen as active and robust people, likely to enter the labour market and be an asset to the host country. Their numbers were relatively modest in comparison to the asylum-seeker flows in Europe from 1990. There has been a paradigm shift in the last two decades: asylum-seekers have come to be viewed not as contributors but as consumers of welfare, to be ‘vulnerable’ and in need of services. Western mental health formulations have come to be the major articulator of their distress and difficulties, whatever country or culture they have come from. Yet their voices, when properly attended to, continue to nominate not the space between their ears but the space around them, their broken social world, as the primary focus of their concerns. Medicotherapeutic viewpoints are also in tension with the moral sense an asylum-seeker might have about what he has passed through (“we are not mad, we are betrayed”, responded a Bosnian man in UK when offered a mental health service). For some, however, a prolonged struggle with marginal, socially incoherent circumstance may exact costs that draw in mental health services. This is a process that may obscure the sociomoral and cultural dimension of their predicament overall, as well as begging questions of the universalist assumptions of Western mental health formulations and treatments. On the other hand, mental health services do not just impinge on passive recipients; asylum-seekers may actively engage if this might impart moral uplift to their claims for scarce social resources like the right to remain in UK or housing.
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