Will psychology ever 'join hands' with disability studies? Opportunities and challenges in working towards structurally competent... 2024 Hunt

Full title: Will psychology ever 'join hands' with disability studies? Opportunities and challenges in working towards structurally competent and disability-affirmative psychotherapy for energy limiting conditions.

Abstract

Despite sustained efforts among critically informed scholars to integrate thinking from disability studies into psychology, the psy disciplines continue to largely neglect the lived experience of disabled people and overlook disability as a form of social inequity and valued culture. In this article, I make a renewed case for integrating thinking from disability studies into psy, in particular within the psychotherapy professions and in the case of ‘energy limiting conditions’, a grass-roots concept that includes clinically and socially marginalised chronic illness such as Long COVID.

Drawing on my experience as a disabled practitioner, and situating this within extant literature on disability and psy, I take an autoethnographic approach to exploring opportunities and challenges in bridging the interdisciplinary divide. I argue that unacknowledged institutional ableism within psy reproduces and is reinforced by physical and attitudinal barriers for disabled practitioners and service users, engendering under-representation of disability in psychotherapy professions and lacunae in disability-affirmative conceptual resources.

Additionally, I propose that hermeneutical lacunae are bolstered by documented defensive clinical practices pertaining to disability. After discussing a wealth of opportunities for integration offered by disability studies, and noting the institutional failure within psy to embrace disability-related demographic and epistemic diversity, I question whether ongoing epistemic and social exclusions within the psy disciplines constitute a case of ‘willful epistemic ableism’.

Drawing on theorising vis-à-vis epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance, I signal a form of systematic, actively maintained and structurally incentivised (motivated) non-knowing that results in collective failure among dominant groups to recognise established hermeneutical resources of the disabled community and allies. I conclude with suggestions of how this form of epistemic injustice might be mitigated.

Open access, https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2024/06/24/medhum-2023-012877

 

Is this paper suggesting that every person with a disability has psychological problems?

...

A study of the gaps?

From wiktionary :

From the American Heritage Dictionary of English :

 

I don’t think so. Joanne Hunt is disabled herself. I think she’s criticising the lack of disability representation in the fields of psychology.

From Abstract

 

It would be pretty damning of psychology if that were the worst of its problems, but it isn't.

When it comes to energy limiting conditions, it's not a non-knowing. It's a false narrative.

It's not an outdated state of affairs maintained by structural inertia, it's deliberate disinformation driven by a powerful and determined lobby.

 

Nailed it. There's nothing passive about it, the offshoot of medicine that makes stuff up about us is doing it in a methodical and deliberate fashion, while the rest is simply negligent for allowing complete BS to have power over people. They know what they're doing. They may not understand the consequences, but they know about them, they just don't care, don't believe in them, because it invalidates everything they do.

It would be positive if psychology were able to mature over this, although I dispute the interdisciplinary label here. This is very much within discipline, just because it's been neglected for this long doesn't change that it should be their responsibility to take one of the most significant aspects of health care into account. Instead it's basically seen as a generic diversity thing, something to write about but never do anything for.

But the gains would be minuscule. Psychology is a largely irrelevant discipline for the most part, its work cherry-picked as support for pre-achieved conclusions, and ignored whenever it goes against cultural trends. The only real benefits would be in therapists being able to provide support for disabled people, whereas right now they pretty much do worse than nothing in most cases, with the only way around this being to find a disabled therapist. And that's not even always enough, because before disability is to be taken into account, deep ableism has to be overcome, and even disabled people often fail at it.

It's medicine that needs to do this. I don't know how, and the fact that the medical profession neglects what is a top 5 issue under their responsibility is absurd enough, but the consequences are far more direct than whatever input psychology can have. The consequences of medicine being uninterested in, not even wanting to hear about, disability has extreme consequences in terms of health care outcomes, but also in terms of policies, with society and governments being largely needlessly cruel against us as a consequence.

Psychological support is a tertiary issue at best here. This isn't something psychology has any influence on, where even if they did clue in on this issue and got it right, a huge assumption, it wouldn't change anything in health care, all the decisions are made by MDs with their MD hat on and in the context of MD systems, algorithms and organizations.

But the fact that disability studies is basically a completely closed off offshoot, considered out of scope of health care despite being a top 5 issue, really is an absurdity of the modern world, a legacy of a very dark past that is really resistant to shining a light on mistakes made.

 

Joanne Hunt is AMAZING!!
Here's a piece she wrote entitled, "Biopsychosocial Model or Bio-political Ideology? Medically unexplained symptoms, welfare reform and the implications for Long-COVID".

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr Simon Duffy for giving me the opportunity to publish this work with Citizen Network Research, and for guiding me through the publication process.

https://www.researchgate.net/profil...eform-and-the-implications-for-Long-COVID.pdf

 

She is also the author of the blog, 'Healthcare Hubris'.
Example here:
https://www.healthcarehubris.com/post/structural-dimensions-of-the-biopsychosocial-model-beginnings

 

More scholarly articles here:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=f9Hgom8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra

 

She's on Twitter:

My new paper explores opportunities and barriers ref disability-affirmative psychotherapy for energy-limiting conditions, inc #MECFS & #longCovid How might disabled & disability-affirmative knowledges transform psy, and what’s holding us back?

 

She also wrote the paper saying patients were right vis à vis PACE and that discontent was fully justified.

 

Thread here, Biopsychosocial Model Or Bio-Political Ideology? Medically unexplained symptoms, welfare reform and the implications for Long-COVID, 2022, Hunt

Thread here, Healthcare Hubris - blogs on the biopsychosocial model by Joanne Hunt

We have a number of other threads on publications from her.