A01=Paul Brodwin
Author_Paul Brodwin
autonomy
bioethics
biopsychiatry
career
Category=MBDC
Category=MBPK
coercion
community psychiatry outreach team
compassionate advocates
engaging
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
ethical dilemmas
everyday struggles
fieldwork
forced dependency
formal bioethics
front line providers
government and governing
health
human condition
intense
marginalized individuals
medical
medical ethics
mental health
mental health clinicians
moral lives
political
politics
private confessions
psychology
realistic
social science
social workers
us healthcare system
Product details
- ISBN 9780520274785
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This book explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. Drawing on years of fieldwork in a community psychiatry outreach team, Brodwin traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. On the street, in staff room debates, or in private confessions, these psychiatrists and social workers confront ongoing challenges to their self-image as competent and compassionate advocates. At times they openly question the coercion and forced-dependency built into the current system of care. At other times they justify their use of extreme power in the face of loud opposition from clients. This in-depth study exposes the fault lines in today's community psychiatry. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Their commentaries about the obligatory and the forbidden also suggest ways to bridge formal bioethics and the realities of mental health practice. The experiences of these clinicians pose a single overarching question: how should we bear responsibility for the most vulnerable among us?
Paul Brodwin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is the editor of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power, and coeditor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives.
