Drawing on metaphors of travel and tourism, I distinguish between epistemological stances that clinicians can adopt when attempting to understand how patients experience their world and their illness. I argue for a particular stance, called world traveling, that involves a shift in clinicians' own commitments, perceptions, and values. I identify barriers to this model but also suggest ways a version of world traveling may be implemented.

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist (...) discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with womens issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are womens issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like. (shrink)