 | Annelieke Driessen Research Fellow - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine |
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03.07.2017-28.07.2017
The labelling of mental disease: Towards responsible labelling practices
We have three types of objectives for this project:
First we have two objectives with respect to content: We want to 1) conduct a multidisciplinary problem analysis of labelling practices concerning psychiatric and mental illnesses. In doing so we will focus on a) Mechanisms that feed into labelling practices, b) what happens when labels cross-over between settings, and c) Identification of problems that emerge in labelling practices (within a field) and after crossover of labels. 2) We want to come up with normative criteria on how to assess the desirability of labeling of mental disorders and labeling practices (see more in the section on ‘expected outcomes’ about the concepts and theories we are thinking about).Secondly we aim to collaboratively write two papers. First of all, an academic paper, primarily aiming at the ethics (more particular bio-ethics) community (see the outline proposed under ‘expected outcomes’). Secondly why want to publish a popular publication in a Dutch newspaper or professional (medical) journal, to disseminate our findings to a wider audience.
Thirdly we want to build a community by establishing a team for future multidisciplinary collaboration on the ethical and societal aspects of neuroscience. We are early career researchers who all have expressed a multidisciplinary interested doing their work. However, within our daily practices we are often confined to the disciplinary boundaries of our field. We would like to use this opportunity to move beyond our own fields and create a basis for future collaboration. The paper would be physical proof of how valuable such collaboration is.
Annelieke Driessen is Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Together with Prof. Simon Cohn and Dr. Erica Borgstrom she conducts an ethnographic research on the ways in which not intervening is an active and central component of good clinical care. She is currently conducting fieldwork with two palliative care teams in an NHS hospital in the UK.
Annelieke's PhD research, based on fourteen months of participant observation in three Dutch nursing homes for people with dementia, focused on ow ways of living well with dementia are brought about in care interactions among people, and between people and their physical environment. In her work, Annelieke is concerned with practices in which residents and care workers seek to come to an 'aligned wanting' as part of good care; practices in which pleasure in the daily care activities in the nursing home is sought and brought about, and what this may teach us about life with dementia; practices of food provision and the kinds of knowledge that these require and give rise to; and the interaction between built environments and a building's users, and how possibilities of action shape what living with dementia may come to be. This research was conducted as part of the Anthroplogy of Care research group.
During her Brocher residency in 2017, Annelieke was part of an interdisciplinary team with Dr. Shannon Spruit, Sicco de Knecht and Esther van Duin exploring what responsible labeling may look like with regard to various settings in which the Schizophrenia label is used. The project seeks to highlight ethical tensions, and ways in which people deal with these tensions. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the debate on how labeling is done, and how it may be done better.
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