The current paradigm of mental health has fallen short in its promises to deliver better care and quality of life for those who lives with mental illness. Recent works have expressed the need for more comprehensive frameworks of research, in which phenomenology emerges as a fundamental tool for a new wave interdisciplinary studies with the humanities. In line with this project, this article hopes to explore the relation between education and phenomenologically oriented psychotherapy, through the work of Brazilian educator Paulo (...) Freire. First, we will briefly expose Freire’s biography and main ideas (such as the “banking model of education” and the creation of “culture circles”), showing how they can be useful during the clinical encounter. We will also highlight the importance of dialogical psychotherapy during situations of injustice and oppression. Finally, we will provide some insights that can help build a new paradigm of mental health that is based on a “praxis of freedom”, whether in research or clinical practice. We call this proposal a “Psychotherapy of the Oppressed”. (shrink)

There is growing philosophical interest in “affective injustice”: injustice faced by individuals specifically in their capacity as affective beings. Current debates tend to focus on affective injustice at the psychological level. In this paper, I argue that the built environment can be a vehicle for affective injustice — specifically, what Wildman et al. (2022) term “affective powerlessness”. I use resources from ecological psychology to develop this claim. I consider two cases where certain kinds of bodies are, either intentionally or unintentionally, (...) deprived of access to goods affording the development and maintenance of their subjective well-being: hostile architecture and masking practices in autism. This deprivation, I argue further, leads to a significant weakening and diminishment of their spatial agency, hinders their well-being, and in so doing gives rise to a pervasive experience of affective powerlessness. By drawing attention to these themes, I show that an ecological approach helpfully supplements existing approaches. It highlights how affective injustice can emerge via the way bodies are positioned in space, and the central role that built environments play in determining this positioning. (shrink)

The domestic spaces of the built environment are traditionally associated with residential architecture. But the domestic spaces can also extend out, metaphorically, into familiar public spaces in which one may feel at home, and also extend inwards into self-perception, insofar as you may say that you dwell within yourself. This article begins by recalling Vitruvius’ fundamental notion of architectural utilitas concerns accommodating not a building’s owners but foreigners and strange outsiders. Vitruvius’ view on utility heavily favoured architecture’s socio-political function, and (...) the guests he believed that architecture ought to accommodate were not merely a home’s owners or their visiting friends, but those people who are more distant from a home’s owners: those who are stranger and less well understood, known as xenos and who ought to be respected under the Ancient Greek religious and ethical principle of xenia. It is on these grounds that Vitruvius makes an ethical critique of residential architecture in favour of the virtue of public architecture. Next the reach of xenia is proposed to extend towards those who are different not merely because of ethnic differences but cognitive and sensory differences. Such accommodations are today accounted for as part of accessibility design and salutogenic design. Similar conceptions are noted in Nietzsche’s notion of an “architecture for the perceptive” and the surrealist’s interpretation of the minotaur as a hybrid not only of animal and human but a hybrid of civilised citizen and barbarian outsider. Together these sketch out an expanded sense of the domestic that includes public spaces designed to accommodate strange outsiders and the hybrid forms used to signify them. (shrink)

Niche construction theory highlights the active role of organisms in modifying their environment. A subset of these modifications is the developmental niche, which concerns ecological, epistemic, social and symbolic legacies inherited by organisms as resources that scaffold their developmental processes. Since in this theory development is a situated process that takes place in a culturally structured environment, we may reasonably ask if implicit cultural biases may, in some cases, be responsible for maladaptive developmental niches. In this paper we wish to (...) argue for an affirmative answer. In order to do so, we first propose to conceptualize implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits, and then proceed to show that these habits are at least partially responsible for maladaptive developmental niches of children with Down syndrome and autism. With this framework we thus hope to bring together two fields of research that haven’t been explicitly connected: implicit bias and niche construction theory. Linking these two theories may bring benefits both to implicit bias researchers, who can extend this concept to characterize other sets of processes as biased, as well as to niche construction theorists, who will have a useful theoretical tool to diagnose maladaptive features of niches brought about by sociocultural biases. (shrink)

There is a strong presumption that mental disorder injures a person's autonomy, understood as a set of capacities and as an ideal condition of agency which is worth striving for. However, recent multidimensional approaches to autonomy have revealed a greater diversity in ways of being autonomous than has previously been appreciated. This presumption, then, risks wrongly dismissing variant, neuro-atypical sorts of autonomy as non-autonomy. This is both an epistemic error, which impairs our understanding of autonomy as a phenomenon, and a (...) moral error, which withholds recognition and respect that autonomous agents are due. I argue that careful attention to the different 'shapes' of agent's autonomy reveals that there are indeed distinctive kinds of neuro-atypical autonomy that are widely mistaken for non-autonomy. This project argues for two propositions. First, that there is a kind of autonomy, with a distinctive shape and texture, available to bipolar agents. This is a variant sort of autonomy, but not a defective or deficient sort. It is the ideal of autonomy that it is worth bipolar agents striving for, given the range and intensity of experiences that they will have to confront. Whilst bipolar autonomy will look unlike more neurotypical kinds of autonomy, it continues to be owed recognition. The second proposition is that we should understand the ideal of autonomy to be both pluralist and highly context sensitive. Given the range of starting points from which agents will strive to an ideal of autonomy, there will be some variation in the ideals worth striving for. The variation in ideals will reflect the existential realities they are local to. Theory of autonomy must be adapted to recognise bipolar, and other neuro-atypical, kinds of autonomy, and to reflect this wider pluralism. These propositions will be argued for with careful attention to the experiences and agency of people living with bipolar, or related, disorders. Understanding the ways that manic or depressive episodes, and the shifts between them, alter and apply pressure to our agency will inform an account of the distinctively bipolar autonomy that can be built on top of it. (shrink)

In cognitive science, there is a tacit norm that phenomena such as cultural variation or synaesthesia are worthy examples of cognitive diversity that contribute to a better understanding of cognition, but that other forms of cognitive diversity (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder/ADHD, and dyslexia) are primarily interesting only as examples of deficit, dysfunction, or impairment. This status quo is dehumanizing and holds back much-needed research. In contrast, the neurodiversity paradigm argues that such experiences are not necessarily deficits but rather (...) are natural reflections of biodiversity. Here, we propose that neurodiversity is an important topic for future research in cognitive science. We discuss why cognitive science has thus far failed to engage with neurodiversity, why this gap presents both ethical and scientific challenges for the field, and, crucially, why cognitive science will produce better theories of human cognition if the field engages with neurodiversity in the same way that it values other forms of cognitive diversity. Doing so will not only empower marginalized researchers but will also present an opportunity for cognitive science to benefit from the unique contributions of neurodivergent researchers and communities. (shrink)

The last few years have seen the emergence of critical phenomenology as an exciting paradigm in phenomenology and beyond, spanning disciplines such as anthropology, urban studies, gender studies an...

In recent years, autopoietic enactivism has been used to address persistent conceptual problems in psychiatry, such as the problem of demarcating disorder, that other models thus far have failed to overcome. There appear to be three main enactive accounts of psychopathology with subtle, although not incompatible, differences: Maiesecharacterizes disorder as distinct disruptions in autonomy and agency; Nielsen characterizes disorder as behaviors that relevantly conflict with the functional norms of an individual; De Haan emphasizes patterns of disordered sense-making, that are transformed (...) through the existential dimension. Given that these accounts are intended to provide not only an ontologically richer account of psychopathology but also reduce the stigma experienced by individuals with mental disorders by accounting for lived experience, a critical analysis of these approaches is needed. I will provide a problematization of enactive accounts of mental disorder, showing that this particular framework does not, as it stands, necessarily reduce the harm and suffering experienced by individuals with mental disorder because of its ontological openness; enactivism leaves much to be interpreted and applied by the clinician (or patient) such that practical and ethical problems in its use arise. (shrink)

The practice of self-diagnosing, amplified by the spread of psychiatric knowledge through social media, has grown rapidly. Yet, the motivations behind this trend, and, critically, its psychological repercussions remain poorly understood. Self-ascribing a psychiatric label always occurs within a broader narrative context, with narratives serving as essential interpretive tools for understanding oneself and others.In this paper, we identify four principal motivators for people pursuing self-diagnosis, pertaining to 1. waiting time and cost of mental health resources, 2. recognition, 3. identity formation, (...) and 4. destigmatization. We compare these motivators against the backdrops of psychiatric narratives, including DSM-based (operationalism), bio-medical, and Neurodiversity narratives, to evaluate the psychological implications of self-ascriptions. We show that while self-ascription aligns with many motivations, it also carries the risk of essentialism across all analyzed narratives, which can over-simplify and sometimes misrepresent people’s attempts to find meaning through psychiatric labels. Essentialism makes narratives less comprehensive, responsive, and resourceful.We contend that self-ascriptions are not inherently problematic; instead, they show the need for greater focus and understanding in psychiatric practices and the importance of incorporating people’s experiences and perspectives in clinical settings. However, both the narratives and the social climate from which they emerge may need adjustments to make self-ascriptions meaningful, comprehensive, and resourceful tools. (shrink)

What do we mean when we talk about epigenetic harm? This paper presents a multidimensional view of epigenetic harm. It is a plea to take a step back from discussions of epigenetic responsibility distributions prevalent in ELSA literature on epigenetics. Instead, it urges researchers to take a closer look at the normative role played by the concept of epigenetic harm. It starts out by showing that the ways in which the object of epigenetic responsibility has already been conceptualized are all (...) related to ‘epigenetic harm’: something negative that happens in which epigenetic mechanisms play a role, or rather something that needs to be avoided. Epigenetic harm is then characterized as a bridging concept between relatively neutral findings on epigenetics on the one side, and potential ethical and societal implications of those findings, primarily in terms of responsibility ascriptions and distributions, on the other. The paper proposes that a sufficiently nuanced account of epigenetic harm should include at least three dimensions. The dimension of causation alone leads to an overly narrow understanding of harm, and a wrong understanding of this dimension might prompt researchers to support an excessively simplistic epigenetic determinism. It is argued that a multidimensional analysis of epigenetic harm is less vulnerable to this threat and more reflective of the various kinds of harm that may be experienced by the subjects of epigenetic alterations. The paper applies insights from disability studies and feminist philosophy to draw attention to two other dimensions of epigenetic harm, namely lived experiences and relationality. The paper concludes by exploring what a shift towards a multidimensional approach to epigenetic harm might mean for epigenetic research and responsibility ascriptions by formulating some concrete implications. (shrink)

This paper addresses the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of mental disorder. We argue that some mental conditions meet both of its criteria —the dysfunction criterion and the harm criterion— and yet should not count as mental disorders because of their value. We contend that the harm criterion, by taking harm as a proxy for disvalue, is an inadequate normative criterion in these cases. Therefore, further ethical considerations should be included as a normative criterion. To illustrate our view, we draw on the (...) experience and reflections of Jean Améry, a philosopher and Holocaust survivor who resisted the diagnosis of KZ-Syndrom. (shrink)