photo project: children around the world with their favorite toys

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Arafa-e-Aisha-Aman-Zanzibar-1024x1024Arafa & Aisha — Bububu, Zanzibar

Toy Sto­ries a photo project by Gabriele Galimberti

…even chil­dren worlds apart share sim­i­lar­i­ties when it comes to the func­tion their toys serve. Gal­im­berti talks about meet­ing a six-​year-​old boy in Texas and a four-​year-​old girl in Malawi who both main­tained their plas­tic dinosaurs would pro­tect them from the dan­gers they believed waited for them at night – from kid­nap­pers and poi­so­nous ani­mals respec­tively. More com­mon was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into: so the girl from an afflu­ent Mum­bai fam­ily loves Monop­oly, because she likes the idea of build­ing houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mex­ico loves trucks, because he sees them rum­bling through his vil­lage to the nearby sugar plan­ta­tion every day.

challenges to the biological/​genetic explanations for schizophrenia

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Via Invol­un­tary Transformations

Schiz­o­phre­nia and Genet­ics— does crit­i­cal thought stop here? by Mary Boyle at a con­fer­ence enti­tled “From Gal­ton to the Human Genome Project: A crit­i­cal appraisal of genetic the­o­ries in psy­chol­ogy and psy­chi­a­try”, 2004

Mary Boyle is Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Clin­i­cal Psy­chol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of East Lon­don and the author of Schiz­o­phre­nia: A Sci­en­tific Delusion?

gender bias and women running for political office

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How the Sys­tem of Beauty Hurts Female Politi­cians by Garance Franke-​Ruta at The Atlantic

A study released Mon­day sheds new light on last week’s foo­faraw over Pres­i­dent Obama’s com­ment that his friend and sup­porter Cal­i­for­nia Attor­ney Gen­eral Kamala Har­ris was “the best look­ing” AG in the land.

Spon­sored by Name It. Change It., a project of the Women’s Media Cen­ter and She Should Run, the March sur­vey of 1,500 likely vot­ers nation­wide found that no mat­ter what is said about a female polit­i­cal candidate’s appear­ance, it has a neg­a­tive impact on what poten­tial vot­ers think of her.

“When vot­ers heard that cov­er­age focused on a neu­tral descrip­tion or a pos­i­tive descrip­tion or a neg­a­tive descrip­tion of the woman candidate’s appear­ance, it hurt her lik­a­bil­ity and it made vot­ers less likely to vote for her,” the groups report of the study, which was con­ducted by Lake Research Part­ners and Chesa­peake Bay Consulting.

“Appear­ance cov­er­age dam­ages vot­ers’ per­cep­tions of the woman can­di­date on all key traits we tested, but the great­est aver­age losses are on being in touch, being lik­able, con­fi­dent, effec­tive and qual­i­fied,” they said.

psychiatry: Stop-​DSM

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David Gothard

Stop-​DSM

HAVING IT OUT ONCE AND FOR ALL WITH THE DSM

MENTAL HEALTH SHOULD NO LONGER REFER TO A SINGLE TEXTBOOK REQUIRED BY THE WHO.

The nomen­cla­ture of the DSM, on which WHO’s ICD-​10 has been mod­eled, has pro­gres­sively become the sin­gle and oblig­a­tory clas­si­fi­ca­tory ref­er­ence of “men­tal disorders”:

- in epidemiology;

- in the field of research and sci­en­tific publications;

- for social pro­tec­tion sys­tems and insurances;

- in order to col­lect sta­tis­ti­cal data for care pol­icy and financing;

- as an unique ref­er­ence man­ual in the teach­ing of psy­chi­a­try in med­ical and psy­chol­ogy schools, for the train­ing of pro­fes­sion­als and lec­tur­ers in health, social and spe­cial edu­ca­tion fields;

- finally, for physi­cians, who, hav­ing no other rel­e­vant train­ing, pre­scribe more and more psy­chotropic drugs, based on ques­tion­able diag­nos­tic criteria.

With the pur­pose of respond­ing to spe­cific and dis­tinct require­ments, the wide­spread use of this unique clas­si­fi­ca­tion becomes a con­fu­sion, inad­e­quacy and risks source. Espe­cially since the WHO is not empow­ered to take deci­sions on sci­en­tific research, but instead it should rec­om­mend inde­pen­dence, diver­sity and pro­mote the coex­is­tence of dif­fer­ent approaches.

More­over, far short of sci­en­tific rigor, the DSM is based on unam­bigu­ously par­tial con­cep­tions. It neglects the clin­i­cal data, mul­ti­plies the patho­log­i­cal cat­e­gories and low­ers the thresh­old of diag­nos­tic cri­te­ria for inclu­sion, which leads to false-​positives and pseudo-​outbreaks (as, for exam­ple, hyper­ac­tiv­ity, bipo­lar dis­or­der or autism). It is mis­used for pre­dic­tive pur­poses in chil­dren and ado­les­cents, tak­ing the risk of harm­ing their devel­op­ment and inte­gra­tion. It also pro­motes what has become, for a large part of the pop­u­la­tion, a real addic­tion to psy­chotropic drugs.

We are on the thresh­old of the DSM-V’s edi­tion, which will increase again the num­ber of cat­e­gories, already over­crowded, and extend the scope of pre­dic­tion. We can­not let it estab­lish such an ori­en­ta­tion, designed to increase arti­fi­cially the num­ber of pathologies.

“mad liberation” and the politics of biopsychiatry

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Excert: The Pol­i­tics of Ratio­nal­ity: Psy­chi­atric Sur­vivors’ Chal­lenge to Psy­chi­a­try by Gabriella Coleman

“…the APA even­tu­ally released a state­ment that admit­ted “brain sci­ence had not advanced to the point where sci­en­tists or clin­i­cians can point to read­ily dis­cernible patho­logic lesions or genetic abnor­mal­i­ties that in and of them­selves serve as reli­able or pre­dic­tive bio-​markers of a given men­tal dis­or­der or men­tal dis­or­ders as a group.”

Down­load (PDF, 1.58MB)

neoliberalism, biopsychiatry, and social ills

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alwy-eyes-handsweb Alwy Fad­hel, Psy­chosis, cof­fee on paper, 38x29cm from the Refugee Art Project

Unrav­el­ing the Biopsy­chi­a­try Knot

The bio­med­ical model of psy­chi­a­try, or “biopsy­chi­a­try,” rests on the belief that men­tal health issues are the result of chem­i­cal imbal­ances in the brain. This is actu­ally a very new idea, but in a short period of time it has come to be regarded as com­mon sense by a whole lot of peo­ple all over the world. More and more, the belief that our dis­sat­is­fac­tion and dis­ease is a result of our indi­vid­ual “brain chem­istry” has been desen­si­tiz­ing many of us to the idea that our feel­ings and expe­ri­ences often have their roots in social and polit­i­cal issues. We find our­selves with all this med­ical­ized lan­guage in our mouths about neu­ro­trans­mit­ters and sero­tonin that doesn’t actu­ally get to the heart of so many of the prob­lems we see around us. How this came about is impor­tant to under­stand if we are going to change it. In this arti­cle I will explain how there were very pow­er­ful polit­i­cal and eco­nomic forces, here referred to as neolib­er­al­ism, which began in the 1980’s, and played a huge role in the dras­tic par­a­digm shift in men­tal health care towards what today is known as biopsy­chi­a­try. I will paint a rough potrait for you of the sit­u­a­tion, using the exam­ple of Depres­sion, in the hopes that it inspires you to explore the story fur­ther, and I’ll con­clude with some ideas about the emerg­ing rad­i­cal men­tal health move­ment you prob­a­bly want to get involved in, or at least know about so you can point oth­ers our direction.

journalism and women scientists: the Finkbeiner test

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The Finkbeiner Test By Christie Aschwanden

Ann Finkbeiner, my col­league at Last Word On Noth­ing, has had enough. As she explained here yes­ter­day, she plans to write about an impres­sive astronomer and “not once men­tion that she’s a woman.” It’s not that Finkbeiner objects to draw­ing atten­tion to suc­cess­ful female sci­en­tists. She’s pro­duced many of these sto­ries her­self. The issue, she says, is that when you empha­size a woman’s sex, you inevitably end up dis­miss­ing her science.

I asked her if there was a par­tic­u­lar story that epit­o­mized the prob­lem, and she pointed me to this two page pro­file of Vera Rubin, pub­lished in Sci­ence in 2002. (Full text is behind a pay­wall, sorry.) Twelve of the story’s 24 para­graphs men­tion Rubin’s sex or gen­der roles. “Two Four para­graphs on her sci­ence, and she was the one who found dark mat­ter,” Finkbeiner says…

…It’s a fine idea. In the spirit of the Bechdel test, a met­ric that car­toon­ist and author Ali­son Bechdel cre­ated to mea­sure gen­der bias in film, I’d like to pro­pose a Finke­beiner test for sto­ries about women in sci­ence. The test could apply to pro­files of women in other fields, too.

To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story can­not mention

The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrange­ments
How she nur­tures her under­lings
How she was taken aback by the com­pet­i­tive­ness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other women
How she’s the “first woman to…”

Here’s another trick. Take the things that are said about a female sub­ject and flip them around as if they were said about a male. If they sound ridicu­lous, then chances are good they have no busi­ness in the story. For instance, in his Guardian pro­file of pre­em­i­nent physi­cist Lisa Ran­dall, John Crace writes, “No mat­ter how much she bends time, there’s no escap­ing the fact that she’s just turned 43 and that if she wants to have kids she’s going to have to get on with it soon.” No one would pos­si­bly write such a thing about a man of her age and status.

“Oh, the humanity!!1!”, he tweeted, downloading pics of the carnage.

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After Susan Edel­man and Can­dice M. Giove in an arti­cle at the New York Post exposed the iden­tity of an FDNY para­medic who posted big­oted slurs with his Twit­ter account under the name “Bad Lieu­tenant” with a pic­ture of Hitler in his pro­file, his fel­low mega-​bigots came to his defense by threat­en­ing the life of Ms. Giove, call­ing her sex­u­ally degrad­ing names, ques­tion­ing her eth­nic­ity, and express­ing their desire for her to need emer­gency ser­vices and then to be denied them because of her crit­i­cism; which of course per­fectly illus­trates why hav­ing such a bigot serv­ing peo­ple in need of emer­gency care is a threat to minori­ties and women and should not be tolerated.

It seems obvi­ous to me that the preva­lence of hate speech directed at women and minori­ties on-​line is not a mag­ni­fi­ca­tion of the hatred, but sim­ply a pro­lif­er­a­tion of expres­sion of that hatred due to con­ve­nience and anonymity. There is some­thing inher­ently wrong with describ­ing the expres­sion of hate speech and death threats as “tweet­ing”. We need a new term.

state sanctioned control of women and “slut-​shaming”

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Sex­ism at the bor­der by Clay Nikiforuk

What do you do when you’re detained by pow­er­ful offi­cials, every­thing you say is pre­sumed decep­tive, arbi­trary “evi­dence” is held against you, and you’re treated like a moral deviant? And what if its 2013, you’re a woman, and the “evi­dence” is that you pos­sess condoms?

It hap­pened three times in two weeks— being detained by U.S. bor­der offi­cials on my way to or through the States.

First I was held by Ver­mont bor­der guards for two hours in the mid­dle of the night on my way to visit Nashville. They searched my bags at least five times. I could not help but notice how often my lin­gerie and “sexy under­wear” were men­tioned, how often the con­doms they found were looked upon scathingly, and how most of the four male offi­cers’ ques­tions per­tained to both. I was baf­fled as to why this was any of their busi­ness and unsure of what their objec­tive was, other than fondling lady’s under­gar­ments. In the end, hav­ing noth­ing to go on, they gave me a lim­ited stay visa of two weeks and let me go – at 3am in the mid­dle of nowhere. I missed my bus and my plane, had to pay for a $90 taxi to the near­est air­port and then book a new flight the next morning.

The next time it hap­pened was two weeks later in Montréal’s air­port. After scan­ning my pass­port, with­out being asked a sin­gle ques­tion, I was imme­di­ately led to a back wait­ing room. When I was sum­moned into an office, the offi­cer cut to the chase: “How much is he pay­ing you to go on this trip?” He was refer­ring to the man I was trav­el­ling with…

…Whether bor­der guards are copy­ing police in New York and their condoms-​as-​evidence-​of-​prostitution model, or are sim­ply so stuck in their gen­der stereo­typ­ing that a woman with con­doms can’t be a good per­son (“We’ve been told that there’s noth­ing good about you,” said one Aruban offi­cial), I’m also not sure.

I do know I won’t be trav­el­ling for some time, until my name is cleared. Or until the puri­tan­i­cal, power-​tripping, slut-​shaming witch hunt is over. I won’t hold my breath for either.