What is the person, and why does it matter in psychiatric care? Brent Robbins, professor of psychology at Point Park University and director of the Psy.D. Clinical Psychology Program, has decided to put this question at the forefront of his research and teaching.
Grant and Brent join in conversation to discuss scapegoating, stigma, and reductionism, asking: how do we find personal meaning in and through mental illness?
2:54 - Psychiatrists face pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to medicate clients in order to treat them.
7:16 - The emotions are a felt, embodied appraisal of one’s situation in light of one’s goals, in which the body is preparing for action.
9:34 - “Whether somebody's dealing with a panic attack or generalized anxiety, I think a good way to think about it is that that anxiety is your friend. It's telling you something that you need to listen to. And if you tune into the anxiety in a contemplative, meditative kind of way, give yourself some silence and opportunity to listen in to that anxiety, oftentimes it can transform it into an insight.” Anxiety can reveal our ontological reality.
15:43 - In cases of voice hearing, a successful therapy can help the person to live with auditory hallucinations in order to make them a “meaningful part of their psyche.”
20:20 - Standard psychiatric practice omits thought about what it means to be a person, resulting in a reductive materialism that assumes the person is epiphenomenal, a byproduct of neurochemicals and biomechanical processes.
22:27 - “If you're going to be a critical thinker, and if you're going to be ethical in your practice, you need to understand … all the assumptions that go into the use of those techniques and whether they make sense and whether they're coherent.” Theory must be just as important as techniques in psychiatric practice.
24:13 - A personal treatment of a schizophrenic patient would gauge whether the person sees meaning in their suffering, their level of engagement in projects and relationships, and their recognition of their dignity.
29:03 - “So the problem is that in that case psychiatry, by medicating the problem, ironically can collude with a dysfunctional system by helping somebody adjust to the dysfunction rather than coming to an awareness of a need for change. Like maybe what you need is not antidepressants. Maybe what you need is a union.”
38:51 - “What makes the [mentally ill] person a threat to the system is that they take the logic of the system to its extreme, logical conclusion in a way that exposes the vulnerability of the system to dissolution.”
42:13 - Therapy must avoid reducing the person to biology, sociology or psychology. While the person is all of these, “there's an excess in the person that's not reducible to any kind of theoretical system at the same time.”
45:18 - “The problem with, I think, stigma and the way I defined it as being the opposite of dignity is I think we tend to give up on people that we stigmatize in that sense, right? We don't really see them as redeemable or valuable.”
48:36 - Alongside rights come responsibilities, and recognizing those responsibilities is part of our dignity.
52:29 - “In the tradition, there's always a balance between justice and mercy, right? … We're made in the dying image, but we always fall short. And God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful. We tend to, in our own finite, sinful way, fail to reconcile that paradox.”
54:33 - Personalism recognizes the dignity of the person beyond something socially constructed.
59:42 - Personalism recognizes the “irreplaceability and uniqueness of the person… If we reduce people to their identities, whether intersectional identities or identities, then I think we're going down a dangerous path.”
1:06:14 - Joy is a fulfillment of a eudaimonic or meaning orientation, out of which, as a byproduct, comes a hedonic wellbeing.