A safe place to talk openly about mental health & illness
Last week I reviewed White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. There were some important concepts that she alluded to but didn’t clearly explain, so I decided to do a post, from a social constructionist viewpoint, about how stereotypes and prejudice develop, and why the difference between implicit and explicit beliefs is important. Our societies create categories… Continue reading Racism, Prejudice, and Implicit/Explicit Beliefs
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, whose background is education and who is white herself, looks at racism and why she believes white people don't want to talk about it. I went into the book knowing that it was popular, but having my doubts about the effectiveness of the title at accomplishing the intended effect. White… Continue reading Book Review: White Fragility
Political correctness drives some people crazy, while others think that being careful about language is necessary to keep from causing offence. There are all kinds of people out there being intentionally offensive (just look at Twitter), but to what extent should we as a society go hunting for it when it's not intended? I don't… Continue reading Is Political Correctness Helpful or Ineffective?
drawing of a ho Last year I wrote about a police wellness check gone wrong, in which a young woman was dragged half-naked in handcuffs through her building by a police officer, While the woman was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, a story about the matter in the Kelowna Daily Courier used the word… Continue reading Homelessness & Addiction: A Newspaper Embraces Stigma
As human beings, each of us is more alike than we are different. In fact, we all share 99.9% of the same genes, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Despite all of this sameness, we pay a lot of attention to differences... but only some differences are socially relevant, and the rest we… Continue reading Why Are Only Some Differences Socially Relevant?
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is moralization. This topic came to mind recently while reading a post on another blog. The author was making pornography a moral issue, and I wanted to do some exploring around that process of moralizing. The term moralization… Continue reading What Is… Moralization
I saw this CBC story recently about a man who was written off because he was just a psych patient. I wanted to write about it, then promptly forgot about it until suninthespring brought it to my attention. In April 2018, David Pontone went to the emergency department at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, Canada.… Continue reading Just a Psych Patient? – Stigma in the ER
Patrick Corrigan has been my research crush for a number of years now. And what is a research crush, you might ask? I like how his mind works. He's a psychologist and stigma researcher, with lived experience to boot. He's one of the most prolific publishers in academic journals that I've ever come across. His… Continue reading The Problem with Language Policing
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is the euphemism treadmill. Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for a… Continue reading What Is… the Euphemism Treadmill
Recently, I came across a post that was a myths vs. facts type deal on mental illness stigma. One of the myths identified was that people with mental illness are disabled. The blogger's response was that, on some days, mental illness could make it harder to work for some people, but there are also people… Continue reading Is It Helpful to Sanitize Mental Illness?