Dialogue with Professor K

[Nev Jones]

Cast of Characters:  Nev, Professor K (editor of prominent philosophy of psychiatry journal), Chorus (only heard by audience)

N: So, Professor, I’ve noticed that there are virtually no articles or responses in your journal written by individuals–academically or non-academically trained–with lived experience…?

PK:  Well, yes, you did realize that it’s a philosophy journal, didn’t you?

Chorus to audience, channeling K:  ["We're not one of these fluffy social science reviews..."]

N:  Yes, I did.  Do you mean to imply that services users (academic and non-academic) cannot ‘do’ philosophy?

Chorus to audience:  We all know the answer to that.

PK:  Ahem…well, of course they can [in theory]…

N: But, ‘in reality,’ none make the cut?

PK: Well, you really can’t say that none of the scholars who write for our journal don’t have lived experience…  How could you possibly know?

Chorus to audience:  For all we know, half of them have been diagnosed with schizophrenia…

N: Alright, let me take a different route.  If you edited a feminist philosophy journal, would you think it perfectly acceptable to exclude female scholars?  [Silence from PK.]  If you edited a philosophy of race journal, would you think it perfectly acceptable for nearly every author, and every editor, to be white and of European origin?

PK:  Obviously I understand the analogies you’re trying to make, but we both know that this is different….

Chorus:  Self-evident fact….

N:  Oh–how so…?

PK:  I would venture that we both know there are critical differences.  Psychiatric disorders affect reason and the intellect in ways that gender and race all too obviously don’t.  ….  In addition, I don’t think any service users would want to write for us.

N:  Really–why would that be?

Chorus to audience, channeling Nev: ["I cannot even count the number of times this journal has published papers intellectually over-simplifying the structure and content of 'psychotic' experience to the point of quite literal absurdity..."]

PK:  I suspect they’re interested in more “practical” rights issues.

N: Really…so ethics, after all, simply has nothing to do with the philosophy of psychiatry–at least not when the purpose is to understand the structure and phenomenology of ‘abnormal’ experience?

PK:  It’s late, I really need to get going…

Chorus to audience:  He really does need to go…

N: Have you in fact ever even attempted to solicit service user perspectives…?

PK:  [Puts on coat.]

N: But, Professor K, what about Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, Deleuze, Butler, Irigaray…feminist, postcolonial and critical race perspectives on power/knowledge, epistemology and oppression?

PK: Last comment–yes, on occasion we do publish the work of scholars with expertize in these figures and movements.

N:  Have you ever [actually] read any of these figures or texts?  Ever thought about how their arguments might apply to academic journals as privileged gatekeepers of ‘scholarly’ knowledge?

Chorus to audience:  We all know the answer to that.

PK: [Scurries out the door.]

Chorus to audience:  Nev and Professor K are both swearing under their breath.  Who will act next?  When might the currents of power reverse their course?

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[Postscript.  Psychiatry, as a discipline & for obvious reasons, is often the target of strong critique from activists, activist scholars, and dissident clinicians...  One might nevertheless wonder why disciplines (or sub-disciplines) like philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics and narrative medicine have pressed on with so little critical scrutiny.  "Writing" user/survivor/experiences "out" of a potential dialogue on madness, maintaining and fortifying spaces in which such discourse have no legitimacy as theory, cannot challenge dominant perspectives, and so forth, is no less problematic, no less damaging, elitist, exclusive...and likely even more strongly proscribes knowledge and knowledge-production.]

[julie gosling]

Heyyyy Nev – brilliant stuff and timely too – the UN Mendez report on torture within healthcare March 2013 firmly places mental health systems within the arena of human rights – so your arguments in support of accommodation and validation of lived experience perspectives hold strong and mirror all the great civil and human rights activists who went before in the fight for gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation equalities – glad to see this on the MHHEHUB – where you can also incidentally find the links I’ve posted to Mendez – All power to you – Julie xx