(SMH1) Exploring Intersections of Feminist Scholarship in Disability and Mental Health
Tuesday Jun 18 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm (Eastern Daylight Time)
Trottier Building - ENGTR 1080
Session Code: SMH1
Session Format: Paper Presentations
Session Language: English
Research Cluster Affiliation: Sociology of Mental Health
Session Categories: In-person Session
Over thirty years ago, Susan Wendell (1989) proposed the need for a “feminist theory of disability.” Since then, scholarship and research from within feminist disability studies has highlighted that disability is indeed a feminist, and intersectional issue. Feminist disability studies has been instrumental in challenging dominant assumptions about ab/normal bodies, disability, and impairment. In addition, feminist disability studies scholars have highlighted the importance of taking into account personal and embodied experiences of impairment and disability, thus making the personal political and fundamentally reframing lived experience as expertise. In view of sustaining shared futures that are diverse and inclusive, we need to consider new challenges and opportunities for developing feminist scholarship that is up to the task of resisting sanism, ableism and other intersecting systems of systemic discrimination and oppression. We believe this can be done by inviting in perspectives from other critical study domains such as Mad Studies, Disability Studies, and Gender Studies in understanding mental health needs and supports, and by combining our efforts in highlighting the voices and expertise of lived experience. Tags: Disabilities, Equality and Inequality, Health and Care
Organizers: Tiffany Boulton, University of Calgary, Xiao Yang Fang, University of Calgary, Joanna Rankin, University of Calgary; Chair: Xiao Yang Fang, University of Calgary
Presentations
Amanda Denis, University of Calgary
Transforming Mental Health Support: Examining the Role of Radical Mental Health Doulas
People experiencing mental health crises are often caught in a system that focuses on symptom eradication but fails to address their specific needs. This paper discusses our ongoing project to develop and implement a grassroots community-based mental health service in the form of a RADICAL MENTAL HEALTH DOULA (RMHD), with the goal of providing support that upholds people’s rights and dignities and advocates for their needs and wishes to be heard. Radical doulas, like traditional doulas, emphasize continuity of care while expanding doula practices by attending to diversity and intersectionality. The Radical Doula movement is rooted in social activism, and is inherently feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, and connects activists, professionals, and allies. Applying the values and principles of Radical Doulas to the mental health sector, RMHDs aim to transform mental health support from the dominating clinical model aimed at fixing the individual using a top-down (doctor-patient) approach, to a peer-to-peer and community-based model that cultivates acceptance and belonging. This paper discusses our ongoing community-engaged Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) project that involves people with lived experiences of mental health struggles as co-researchers. The FPAR approach provided opportunity for continuous relationship building, inclusion of diverse lived experience expertise, and for vulnerable emotions to be shared in all phases of the project from conceptualizing a grassroots community-based and social-justice oriented RMHD framework to developing a training curriculum and piloting the first cohort of RMHDs in Calgary, Alberta. Eight co-researchers completed the five-day RMHD training in spring 2023 and each supported two clients for a period of six months from June to November, 2023. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the RMHDs at the mid-point of the pilot project and at the end. A secure digital platform, Zamplo, was used to collect demographic data about the RMHDs and the clients, as well as journal reflections, and monthly client check-in surveys. Preliminary data analysis reveals that working outside of formal systems, RMHDs are able to establish strong relationships with clients, built on trust, offering continuous care that is tailored to each client’s evolving needs. Challenges that RMHDs experienced in their work, included adapting to a broad and constantly shifting scope of work, questions around whether they were doing enough for their clients, emotional heaviness of responding to clients’ experiences of trauma, and the need for a strong doula community of support. The RMHD project is now preparing for a second pilot project. Findings from the first pilot are informing adaptations to the RMHD training curriculum, doula and client recruitment processes, and how to increase visibility and legitimacy of RMHDs role working parallel to the mental health system. Progress to date shows that by combining individualized and flexible care, RMHDs have a unique ability to support clients as they engaged with the mental health system. Clients are feeling more confident, respected, and heard because they have been provided resources and are supported by RMHDs before or after these encounters. The RMHD framework is innovative, sustainable, and could potentially build a shared future for all community members who engage with the mental health system.
Non-presenting authors: Tiffany Boulton, University of Calgary; Joanna Rankin, University of Calgary; Xiao Yang Fang, University of Calgary
Megan Ingram, Queen's University
The prevalence of unsolicited advice in the lives of disabled people is well-catalogued through the mass of articles and social media posts dedicated to the issue (e.g., Blahovec 2017; Pulrang 2020). However, less is known about the affective impacts of this advice on disabled people and the potential resistance that may be enacted towards affects labelled negative, such as shame (Kolarova, 2012; Jóhannsdóttir, Egilson and Gibson, 2021). The present manuscript builds from original qualitative research to explore the links between emotion, mind, and body that occur in interactions involving unsolicited advice between disabled and non-disabled individuals. Using narrative accounts from fifteen semi-structured qualitative interviews with disabled individuals in Ontario, Canada, the research addresses: 1) The affective impacts of unsolicited advice on disabled people. 2) Strategies disabled people use to manage the emotional impact resulting from unsolicited advice and “blame culture" (Hughes 2015), individually and collectively. 3) The ways disabled individuals emote or ‘perform’ their subject positioning in response to this unsolicited advice. Ultimately, this research argues that while unsolicited advice acts as a method of blaming and shaming, wherein non-disabled individuals work to soothe their own discomfort with disability and the broader neoliberal political context, disabled people resist feeling ashamed and strategically react to and deploy emotion in response to unsolicited advice in resistant and empowering ways. In this work, I conceptualize unsolicited advice as advice given without explicit solicitation of or requests for guidance, and which is largely understood to be unwanted by the recipient. Extant research on unsolicited advice is primarily oriented towards either cultural variance or social-psychological models that fail to account for the specific experiences of Disabled people as ‘affect aliens’ or ‘killjoys’ (Ahmed, 2010) in what Hughes (2015) terms a ‘blame culture’, wherein disabled individuals are resented and blamed for not only their own disability, but broader socio-cultural concerns and other’s health. Honing in on blame and the affective impetus for unsolicited advice is crucial, as recent scholarship on disability and affect has indicated shame as an affect with considerable political power (Jóhannsdóttir et al. 2021) due to its capacity to indicate the “political horizon:” what is considered politically desirable within a collectivity (Gould, 2009; Kolarova, 2012). While prior research on advice and ideological and sociocultural conceptualizations offer insight into the potential affective motivations for the giving of unsolicited advice, very little is known about the actual affective experiences, emotive consequences, and resistant strategies of disabled people who received such advice. Further, existing research on disabled experience and affect largely focuses in on the solely negative impacts of disablism, oppression and shaming practices, positioning some emotions as purely oppressive and as only useful in inciting a narrative trajectory towards the ‘better’ positive emotions. While this prior research has been critical to opening up space in affect research on disability and in conceptualizing both the oppressive impacts of affect within structural systems and the resistant potentialities of pride and joy, much is lost in the dichotomizing of emotion and the creation of narrative trajectories and affective binaries. The failures of affective binaries (particularly around shame/pride) to capture the lived affective experience of unsolicited advice are explored in this manuscript through narrative data collected from fifteen semi-structured qualitative interviews with disabled people undertaken using a feminist re-storying and desire-based methodology (Tuck, 2009). Ultimately, while participants collectively identified unsolicited advice as an affective practice and shaming tool, they did not describe in their narratives a full rejection of shame, nor a complete embrace of disability pride at all times. Rather, participants were intentional in their narration, maintaining that both seemingly “bad” and “good” emotions coexisted across social encounters. Rather than navigating a linear trajectory from this initial “negative” affective response towards pride, participants instead spoke continually about an orientation towards connection that required sitting with their feelings, even “bad” affects, and allowing those emotions to guide them towards other people and other futures. Thus, while unsolicited advice undoubtedly caused negative affective experiences, harm, and oppression, this did not exist in a vacuum and coexisted with resilience, resistance, and a desire for futures and worlds otherwise.
Jay Tang, University of Victoria
Canada is currently on track to have one of the most permissive MAID programs in the world, with medical assistance in dying available to those with terminal medical conditions, those with non-terminal medical conditions, and imminently, those with mental illness. Though achieving legal access to MAID is often presented as a victory for disability rights, examining MAID through a critical intersectional, feminist lens resists its framing as a victory for the bodily autonomy of disabled people. Such a lens complicates the socially revered concept of autonomy in the context of a society that provides accessible avenues to death without providing equally accessible avenues to living and thriving. Despite a recent increase in research in the area of MAID for mental illness (MAID-MI), there remain several problematic research gaps. First, though autonomy and self-determination are central to the MAID debate, the literature surrounding MAID for mental illness largely fails to consult individuals with mental illness, instead highlighting the paternalistic debates of physicians, lawyers, ethicists, and other professional experts. Given that individuals with mental illness form the population that will most tangibly be affected by the change in legislation, there is urgent need to understand, amplify, and prioritize their lived/living perspectives. Second, there is a lack of research investigating the specific perspectives of marginalized people, who experience mental illness at disproportionately high rates due largely to the compounding impact of racism, homophobia/transphobia, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. Marginalization, in all of its forms, is inextricably linked with disability; this is accomplished through the pathologization of deviance/difference and through the targeted debilitation of marginalized populations under a capitalist, ableist, white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy (Puar, 2017). To provide the option of a state-facilitated death to disabled people, then, is to provide the option of a state-facilitated death disproportionately to those already marginalized. Further, to provide the option of a state-facilitated death uniquely to disabled people is to insinuate that there is a suffering unique to this population that makes the provision of their death a merciful act. An equitable and comprehensive examination of MAID necessitates an interrogation of the nature of this suffering and the efforts that have been made to ease it; this interrogation has thus far been lacking. As someone who is situated at the intersection of several marginalized identities, I am interested in the societal implications of providing disabled people – at any stage of their adult life – with a fast-tracked death. In this presentation, I will present preliminary findings from an ongoing SSHRC-funded project examining identity, marginalization, and MAID-MI from the perspectives of 2S/LGBTQ+ individuals with mental illness. This qualitative study highlights marginalized voices through semi-structured interviews analysed in a feminist-of-color disability framework, which disrupts the dominant (white) narratives in feminist disability studies and emphasizes the mutual integrality of race, gender, and disability studies. Developed by Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim, this framework incorporates elements of feminist-of-colour critique, feminist disability studies, queer theory, and crip theory, and moves beyond identity politics and individualized constructs of “disability” in order to understand and critique the ways in which intersecting systems of oppression both create and define disability and impairment. Using this framework, I will contextualize participants’ perspectives within social structures of oppression and highlight the fundamentally intersectional nature of the systemic devaluation of disabled life.
Kendal David, Carleton University
In this paper presentation, I consider the theoretical possibilities of using feminist disability studies (FDS) to research social assistance and other income supports in Canada. Informed by my experience designing an FDS-informed doctoral dissertation project, I consider how taking up this theoretical frame offers new conceptual possibilities and new questions to inform poverty research in Canada. The relationship between disability, gender, and poverty is significant; however, research on Canadian income supports has yet to mobilize FDS to consider how ideological issues like productivity and reproductivity shape these programs. In this presentation, I consider how theoretical contributions from feminist disability studies–including robust conceptualizations of productivity, the marketization of care, and the significance of interdependence–could be effectively mobilized for more robust analyses of income support programs. Drawing on the work of core feminist disability scholars, I identify key concepts and insights from this body of knowledge that can meaningfully inform research on income insecurity. To make the case for feminist disability studies’ usefulness for examining income supports, I contend that: Feminist disability studies offers a robust conceptualization of labour and work, which attends to how productivity is conceptualized, measured, and revered, and how cisheterosexism, ableism, and racism shape these normative frameworks. While visioning anti-capitalist futures where labor is reimagined, it demands acknowledgement and acceptance that people may never be employed at all (for so many reasons) and attends to those in the “cliffhangers” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 40) of disability identity status, who are denied access to resources by neoliberal employment and social support policy. Feminist disability studies foregrounds the consequences of marking people as unproductive (i.e., unable to meet capitalist expectations of labor and productivity) and, in particular, highlights the relevance of ongoing institutionalization and the marketization of care to social policy and analyses of poverty and income supports. Feminist disability studies acknowledges the eugenic tendencies of capitalism and confronts its manifestations in for-profit care provision which mark so-called ‘unproductive’ people as objects for extraction. Feminist disability studies rejects independence as an ideal (in the ways it is conceptualized in the context of ableist capitalism) as well as the framing of dependence (on the state, on caregivers, on other people) as a problem to be solved. Recognizing that connection and community are essential for survival, feminist disability studies research that examines poverty should consider how, for example, income support programs, either facilitate or obstruct the existence and flourishing of ecologies of interdependence. I conclude the presentation by reflecting on the possibilities of pulling analytic focus towards ableism and sexism, and how FDS offers researchers a unique and nuanced way to think about the importance of robust social welfare systems which afford people dignified access to material well-being regardless of their “productive” capacity in a capitalist labour market.
Shahina Parvin, Brandon University
In this paper, I present findings from in-depth interviews with 13 racialized immigrant women mental health service users in a prairie city, Lethbridge, Canada. The women’s narratives demonstrate that their use of mental health services is linked to their suffering and damage resulting from post-immigration struggles, racialization, gendered norms, domestic and sexual violence, and discrimination in workplaces in Canada. The suffering these women experienced could be seen as a response to their life situations. Yet, without an explanatory framework about those situations, lacking adequate ‘local cultural’, social and economic supports, and finding themselves situated in a society where psychologization and pathologization of suffering are normative, the women instead doubted their cultural ways of living, performativity, identity and ability to achieve a western neoliberal way of living, ‘productive life’ and ‘ideal sane self’. The women went to physicians and/or psychotherapists seeking solutions, drawing upon western psychiatric discourses of suffering and madness. Most of the women in this study were diagnosed with anxiety disorders and/or depression by their physicians, though a few self-diagnosed, drawing upon lay discourses on the medicalization of mental distress, and illustrating their compliance with psychiatric conceptualizations of their problems as individual, biological and pathological. While most of these women sought mental health services due to pain that I suggest is itself a product of neoliberal/settler colonial and heteropatriarchal culture, the psychiatric treatments prescribed by their physicians functioned to further encourage several women to assimilate to these misogynist and imperial structures in order to function ‘better’ as workers, students, mothers, wives, and social beings. Despite differences in their suffering, diagnoses, and use of mental health services, these women worked on themselves to reach a ‘normal life’ and ‘ideal self’ within their discriminatory structural settings. Drawing on these narratives, in this paper, I respond and extend critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarships on madness that claim about the ways in which normative suffering has been constructed as mental disorders, and the ways that psychiatric knowledge, categorization and treatments are gendered and imperialist. I suggest that in order to better address these folx’s suffering, it is important to understand intersectional power relations that played an important role in contributing to these women’s damage.