"Et Si Foucault N'Avait Pas Tort?," Five Seminars, Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon, September 2010-January 2011.

The Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3) has put together a seminar focusing on Foucault’s work on psychiatry and its relevance today . The seminar will encompass five meetings running from September 2010 to January 2011 and is open to anyone interesed.

• 16 septembre de 18h à 20h.  "La méthode Foucault" par Dr Boulay et Catherine Dekeuwer
• 21 octobre de 18h à 20h.  "La folie" par Dr Giloux et Claude Olivier Doron
• 4 novembre de 18h à 20h.  "Foucault et la psychanalyse" par J. Lecaux et Elisabetta Basso
• 16 décembre de 18h à 20h.  "La normalité" par Dr Varagnat et Roland Chvetzoff
• 06 janvier de 18h à 20h.  "La sécurité" par Dr E. Venet et Arnaud Sourty

For further information, visit: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/seminar-et-si-foucault-navait-pas-tort/.

Rasmussen, Andrew. "Americanising the Global Mind." STATS March 15, 2010.

Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press, 2010. Watters’ central thesis goes something like this: by expanding their realm through the forces of globalization, American mental health professionals are harming other societies by introducing Western symptoms into the way people in other cultures express their distress and replacing the local explanations for mental health problems with Western scientific models. He begins by introducing readers to a fact that many of us who study mental health globally know well: the expression of and explanation for mental illness depend in part upon the culture in which the individuals afflicted reside. In the language of the field, they are “culturally-mediated.” Watters provides several good examples of this in Crazy Like Us, but the clearest articulation comes from McGill Unversity Professor, and Editor of Transcultural Psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer who is interviewed at length. Kirmayer explains that most cultures have an experience of isolation and decreased motivation that we, in the United States, typically, would call depression. In India this might be characterized by a feeling that the heart is physically descending in the body, in Nigeria by reports of a peppery feeling in the head, and in Korea by “‘fire illness’… a burning in the gut.” Readers interested in hearing a compendium of foreign mental illnesses will not be disappointed. Most of these have analogs in the West (as with depression), but others do not. The most infamous of these is koro of Southeast Asia, or the sudden feeling that one’s penis is decreasing in size or disappearing altogether. If this sounds amusingly off-beat, an outbreak of a similar condition in the 1990s in a number of West African countries resulted in mobs beating and killing several women suspected of witchcraft. These psychological phenomena are real in that they have real behavioral consequences. These “indigenous” disorders are being displaced by Western concepts primarily, Watters claims, by unwitting journalists in the developing world who defer to Western experts and by adventurous Western mental health professionals out to do good. Westerners introduce ideas of how mental health problems should be expressed – or, more accurately, how they are expressed in Western culture – and sufferers hear about these and mimic them. . . . Read the rest here: http://stats.org/stories/2010/americanizing_global_mind_3_15_10.html.

Watters, Ethan. "The Americanization of Mental Illness." NEW YORK TIMES January 8, 2010.

Watters, Ethan, Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press, 2010 (forthcoming). AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad. This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing. The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book Mad Travelers, the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time. “We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book Paralysis: the Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom. “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.” In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. That is until recently. For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?em.

"The Other Side of Reason: the History of Madness Today," Humanities Institute, SUNY Buffalo, October 31-November 1, 2008.

Taking its inspiration from the recent publication of the complete English translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, this conference aims to examine various histories of madness and what “madness” means today. Foucault reinvented history as a discourse capable of articulating the intimate yet hostile relationship between madness and reason, especially on the far side of the most ambitious attempts to uphold rationality as the basis of human institutions. The questions raised by History of Madness seem especially timely in an era that increasingly invokes “reason” to adjudicate unforeseen ethical and political crises. Yet the urgency of contemporary predicaments all too easily rationalizes the speedy elimination of “madness,” thereby prompting a return to forms of violent confinement—such as “indefinite detention”—that were the object of Foucault’s original critique. Mindful of this critique, our conference seeks to think through manifestations of madness that remain inseparable from its “others,” whether understood as reason, civilization, philosophy, normalcy, law, the university, and so on. . . . Conference Schedule: Friday, October 31 9:30 a.m. Registration, Center for the Arts, North Campus 9:50 a.m. Welcome, Tim Dean, Department of English, Director, Humanities Institute, UB and Bruce McCombe, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 10:00-11:30 a.m. Elizabeth Lunbeck Departments of History and Psychiatry Vanderbilt University "Narcissism Normalized: Heinz Kohut's Psychoanalytic Revolution" Moderator: Susan Cahn, Department of History, UB 11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m. Guy Le Gaufey Psychoanalyst, École Lacanienne de Psychoanalysis, Paris "Knitting Foucault, Purling Foucault" Moderator: Steven Miller, Department of English, UB 2:30-4:00 p.m. Benjamin Reiss Department of English , Emory University "Creative Writing and Psychiatric Surveillance: Virginia Tech and the Politics of Risk Management" Moderator: Carrie Tirado Bramen, Department of English; Executive Director, Humanities Institute, UB 4:15-5:45 p.m. Bruce Jackson Department of English , University at Buffalo "Out of Time and Doing Time: When Madness Became Criminal" Moderator: Lisa Szefel, Department of History, Pacific University Saturday, November 1 9:30 a.m. Registration, Center for the Arts, North Campus 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 p.m. Marjorie Garber Departments of English & American Literature; Visual & Environmental Studies Harvard University "Mad Lib" Moderator: Donald E. Pease, Humanities Institute Distinguished Scholar in Residence 11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m. Elizabeth Povinelli Department of Anthropology, Columbia University "The Exclusions of Reason: Ab-Original Truth, Rhetoric, Genealogy" Moderator: Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Department of Anthropology, UB 2:30-4:00 p.m. Screening: Titicut Follies (1967) Frederick Wiseman's controversial documentary about the treatment of criminally insane inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution. Moderators: Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, Department of English, UB For further details, consult the conference homepage here: http://www.humanitiesinstitute.buffalo.edu/initiatives/annual-conference.shtml.