What is Mental Illness?
Justin Garson, Nev Jones, and Marco Ramos in conversation with Kendall Atterbury
N.B. This event will last 75 minutes (rather than the usual 60 minutes).
Talk about mental illness is as much a social and political matter as it is a medical one. There are few concepts that so dramatically enact the imbrication of power and knowledge that Michel Foucault famously described. But what are we doing when we speak about mental illness? Which voices are permitted to speak and which are discounted? What motivations, assumptions, and values underwrite various claims about the appearance, shape, function, and cause of mental illnesses?
Moreover, whose interests and values are served in the different discourses around mental illnesses, and, perhaps most importantly, how do these different discourses impact the lives of those who are made objects of interrogation yet are too often denied the status of full subjects – approached more as a “what” than a “who”? And what are the effects of public and media calls to “normalize” mental health conversations while simultaneously depicting images of mental illness that centre around pharmaceuticals, violence, unpredictability, and the absence of a responsive subject?
This conversation between Justin Garson (philosopher), Nev Jones (community mental health researcher), and Marco Ramos (psychiatrist/historian) will aim to offer a sense of the scope of what is at stake in our understanding of mental illness, considering the place of biology, society, histories of oppression, evolution, and lived experience in such an understanding.
Justin Garson is professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His latest book, Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, was published last year.
Website: https://www.justingarson.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/justin_garson
Nev Jones is a community-engaged mental health services researcher, with an interdisciplinary academic background in social and political philosophy, community psychology (MA, PhD) and medical anthropology.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/viscidula
Marco Ramos is a historian of medicine and psychiatry resident at Yale University. His historical research focuses on mental health activism and revolutionary politics in Latin America.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mramos_histmed
Kendall Atterbury is a person with lived experience of psychosis. She is an affiliate of Yale School of Medicine’s Program for Recovery and Community Health and has an interdisciplinary academic background that includes study in political theory and theological studies (MA, MTS), and social work (MSW, PhD).