Beyond the Individual: Systems, Crisis, and the Social Conditions of Distress- 5-5:30pm Mental Health Crisis: Whose Crisis Is it, Really? - Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW
- 5:30-6pm Disordered Systems, Not Disordered Selves: Isolation and Institutional Power in First-Person Accounts of Psychosis - Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC
Mental Health Crisis: Whose Crisis Is it, Really? - Zephyr Doles, MA, LMSW
What is a “mental health crisis”? Is it a problem of the individual, or a larger breach of social norms; an illumination of the failures of a fractured society; a metaphor for the alienation produced by intensifying pressure on the individual within a society that increasingly serves the needs of corporations over people? Mental health crisis response has been a major topic in the intersecting fields of social work, psychology, and community mental health over the past decade, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic and other crises of our time. However, much of the existing literature has focused on comparing the efficacy of various current mental health emergency response models without specific regard to how the crises of the individuals served reflect broader, social and historical crises and institutional failures. In my project, I will critically examine how by focusing interventions entirely on the pathology of the individual, current definitions of “mental health crisis” represent a failure of containment, not just of the individual, but of the broader social, political and historical contexts that contribute to psychological distress. By failing to integrate the social, historical, and political dimensions of psychological experiences that may present as a mental health crisis in an individual, current prevailing concepts of mental health crisis are prone to reproduce the harms of the psychiatric establishment and the provision of services under the neoliberal welfare state, rather than alleviate them. In conclusion, by carefully situating the current “mental health crisis” as it is understood as a defining issue of our time within the backdrop of global polycrisis, my project will introduce new ways of seeing mental health crises not as failures of broken individuals, but as representations of larger social processes that alienate and disconnect vulnerable populations from themselves and from society at large.
Disordered Systems, Not Disordered Selves: Isolation and Institutional Power in First-Person Accounts of Psychosis - Ashley Phillips, MA, MT-BC
Dominant frameworks often conceptualize psychosis as a pathology existing within the individual, minimizing the social dimension and placing responsibility for isolation on individuals experiencing psychosis. Existing research suggests that these individuals experience profound isolation, but these experiences are often reduced to symptoms rather than understood as meaningful responses to fractured social worlds.This presentation explores experiences of isolation in psychosis, with a focus on the ways that social standards and institutional power shape experiences of isolation and belonging. The exploration uses an existential-phenomenological perspective to thematically analyze 17 published first-person accounts of psychosis. The findings of this study suggest that psychosis can be understood as a response to and reflection of disordered systems, not disordered selves. By positioning psychosis within the social and institutional link, this presentation challenges dominant models of psychopathology and explores implications for clinical practice that prioritize subjective meaning, reflexivity, and liberation.
