Welcome to the latest in our series of Ed non-Tech Conversations… wherein we invite educators from across various roles, disciplines, and backgrounds to speak to their teaching practices… learning design… research… or anything else that comes to mind!
Kathleen MacPhee, MSW is a counsellor, social worker, and educator in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She owns and operates Third House Counselling and Support, and she is an Instructor with the Social Service Community Worker Program at New Brunswick Community College (NBCC), Fredericton campus.
Please check out the video and/or audio below to hear our chat!
Matt’s Notes
Comments and Resources via Kathleen
By way of an introduction to Mad Studies -which I didn’t really talk about but is nonetheless relevant to/informs my approach to teaching, counselling, and social work generally:
Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies
Edited by Bren LeFrancois (my mentor at MUN), Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume
Psychiatry and the Business of Madness: An Ethical and Epistemological Accounting by Bonnie Burstow
For good measure I’ll include my only published article to date, that I co-authored with my friend and colleague Lynsey Wilson Norrad:
Learning and Unlearning: Two Social Workers’ Autoethnographic Exploration into Mad Studies Journal of Progressive Human Services
…which leads me to Greg Procknow’s recent thematic literature review that has implications for all kinds of exciting inquiry into the relationship between Mad Studies and Higher Ed: A Literature Review of Mad Studies as Critical Pedagogy: What is Mad Studies, and How does it Implicate the Education of Adults? New Horizons in Adult Education and Resource Development
Most people have no idea what Mad Studies is or what it means to practice from a Mad Studies informed lens. For me, at its simplest, this really just means two things:
- I listen to what people have to say about their experiences with the mental health system. The “mental health crisis” that gets bandied about is, to me, not so much a misnomer as it is ill-defined: people’s experiences are being dismissed in favour of labelling and medicating; people are still being told that they have a chemical imbalance despite an overwhelming lack of evidence (see Moncrieff et al., a damning and definitive umbrella review that has the powers that be back peddling, stating that the chemical imbalance theory was only ever meant to be a metaphor and that patients were never told they have a chemical imbalance). People are struggling and need help. Unfortunately, despite the widely held belief – and hope – that modern psychiatry is there for us in our time of need, what many find is a lack of informed consent regarding treatment options, coercion, and forced treatment. This has real world consequences ranging from nasty effects of psych drugs (hello brain zaps, sexual dysfunction, and agitating movement disorders) to loss of agency and decision making. In the worst cases, these consequences intersect with the criminal justice and child protection systems. Along with the voiceless recipients of those who have been harmed in the name of helping, the World Health Organization is calling for an end to coercion and forced treatment in mental health care, and a move toward community-based care models.
- I question the legitimacy and usefulness of the mental health system as it exists today. Psychiatry has a stranglehold on our understanding of difference and distress (informed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM). This leaves very little room for explanation of people’s struggles outside of the medical model, meaning that trauma and the social determinants of health take a backseat to the idea ‘broken brains’. The World Health Organization agrees with me here, too.
All of this to explain how my affinity for Mad Studies translates into my work in the classroom. I teach a mental health foundations course to my first year students and begin by orienting them to what is a new way of thinking about mental health. Before I even start talking, I have them search up (via google or our in house academic holdings) “chemical imbalance” and another word – proof, fact, evidence, or something of the like, and report their findings back to me. Confusion comes, and the conversation starts. We talk about the history of psychology and psychiatry and examine the ways in which we might not be as advanced as we think when it comes to the way we understand and “treat” human suffering. We talk about epistemic injustice and sanism. Fortunately, the competencies that my students are required to leave this course with are very much in line with a Mad Studies approach.
Of course, I have content that needs to be delivered; this is covered in a textbook that ignores the impact of trauma (which does change our brains!) and is steeped in the biomedical model, and we look at that critically too. This year my students were taken with the Hearing Voices approach to working with people diagnosed with schizophrenia or who experience psychosis. They wonder why they’ve never heard of such a common sense and humane approach.
These ideas intersect with the content in my other courses: we favour participatory action research in research methods and stay close to the “nothing about us without us” credo in community development. My students will be working with individuals facing some of the most difficult times of their lives, and it’s my responsibility to ensure that they are equipped to understand these difficulties in a way that does not create harm additional stress and barriers to the people they’re charged with assisting.
Many thanks to Kathleen for joining us! And many thanks to you for checking out the EnT!
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