{"title":"‘Solitude is not thrust upon any lovable person’: loneliness, shame and the problem (of) personality","authors":"Fred Cooper","doi":"10.1332/14786737y2023d000000004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/14786737y2023d000000004","url":null,"abstract":"The relationship between loneliness and shame is frequently asserted, usually under-theorised, and very rarely subject to historical attention and care. Researchers in and across a number of disciplines are comfortable in the truism that shame and stigma are attached to loneliness through a series of psychosocial processes and dialogues, with negative social, medical, cultural and political valuations of loneliness dovetailing into neoliberal (and older) logics of individual responsibility for relationships and health. Far less clear is where these languages come from; how shame has accrued (or been assembled) around loneliness as an emotion or experience; and how this has changed over time. Drawing on the author’s practice as a historian of medicine, this article follows the problem of ‘personality’ through primary sources in print journalism, loneliness activism, public health work, and the psy and social sciences. It traces shaming narratives on loneliness through interwar and postwar conversations on selfishness, self-pity and the typology of lonely personalities, and considers how discourses on hostility and intolerance shaped a growing theorisation of chronic and intractable loneliness.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135365825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jaycee Kennett, Imogen Keites, Daniel Steward, Rachel Rahman
{"title":"A systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis of first-hand conceptualisations of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI)","authors":"Jaycee Kennett, Imogen Keites, Daniel Steward, Rachel Rahman","doi":"10.1332/14786737y2023d000000001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/14786737y2023d000000001","url":null,"abstract":"Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a growing phenomenon that correlates with significantly negative outcomes including psychopathology, hospitalisation and suicide; however, there exists little consensus on how to best understand it. This lack of conceptual consensus risks inconsistent clinical practice in a population that often reports poor experiences of professional support, therefore an understanding of how individuals conceptualise their own NSSI without attempting to fit it into existing causal and functionalist models is needed. This review sought to examine and synthesise first-hand conceptualisations of NSSI in existing qualitative literature using interpretive phenomenological synthesis. A systematic database search of qualitative literature was conducted, including interviews with individuals with experience of NSSI across all ages and settings, published in English from 1950 to 2022. Twenty-three studies were included in the final meta-synthesis. Three superordinate themes were generated via the synthesis: (1) NSSI is embedded in the social world; (2) NSSI is symbolic and communicative; and (3) NSSI represents taking back agency. This synthesis, comprised of both reported data and the themes identified by the researchers in the papers, highlighted that NSSI is a diverse behaviour that is inextricably linked with sociocultural context and that, paradoxically, it can be simultaneously communicative and private. This research urges an introspective examination of how clinicians and researchers in the field conceptualise NSSI and how this juxtaposes with how individuals who engage in the behaviour conceptualise it.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135853913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maternal subjectivity of Indian Muslim mothers: reflections on the hijab and education","authors":"Syeda Naghma Abidi","doi":"10.1332/14786737y2023d000000003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/14786737y2023d000000003","url":null,"abstract":"Most theories of motherhood, across different societies, tend to be anchored on the child’s needs. This results in mothers either idealised or blamed for the impact they have on their child. In all this theorising, I have found that maternal voice is absent, creating a gap in our understanding of maternal subjectivity. This article is part of the larger doctoral work focused on Indian Muslim mothers, building on Benjamin’s work that argues for mutual recognition of the other in a dyadic relationship as a subject. A psychosocial lens is used to explore the maternal experiences of raising adolescent daughters in contemporary times where the Muslim identity is frowned upon and their cultural practices are a matter of debate. In politically charged contemporary India, where religion is a prominent source of conflict, an Indian Muslim woman, doubly marginalised due to her gender and community, which is in a minority, would find it difficult to find a voice as a mother. Her reflections on hijab and education are highlighted in this article as she mothers and makes an attempt to provide a voice for herself and her daughter. It is proposed that her understanding of the relationship with her mother can be crucial to her negotiation of the current dilemmas of wearing a hijab and the significance of religious and secular education. The voices were captured in in-depth interviews conducted in the capital city of Delhi and have an implicit cultural flavour of North India.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135853297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examining privilege, puzzlement and the problematic positioning of the ‘psychologist’ as internal consultant in psychologically-informed environments","authors":"Jonathan Day","doi":"10.1332/14786737y2023d000000002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/14786737y2023d000000002","url":null,"abstract":"Deliberate self-harm and the attribution of intentionality – that sufferers are choosing to harm themselves – have become dominant constructs within mainstream Western mental health care. The aim of this paper is to explore the author’s privileged positioning as internal consultant, whereby psychological knowledge was used to explain why a chronically excluded homeless adult refused an invitation to reside inside. The attribution of intention to an individual perceived as engaging in deliberate self-harm is explored over three psychological case discussions with staff. A critique is offered that psychologised attributions merely add to patients’ existing predicaments and psychosocial dismemberment. Scanlon and Adlam’s seminal work on reciprocal violence is referenced as a critique, that instead of choosing to harm oneself, subjects are communicating to carers their internalised experiences of interpersonal violation and neglect which have in turn given rise to violent states of mind. The paper could be used as a reflective aid to facilitate clinicians and scholars to consider how to digest violent and unthinkable material, and consider one’s own personal obstacles to thinking about unhoused minds and psychosocial dismemberment.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135853121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whose borderline is it anyway? Editorial and overview","authors":"David W. Jones, Jo Lomani","doi":"10.1332/147867321x16878111260082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867321x16878111260082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79401770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dispelling myths and challenging neglect in ‘borderline personality disorder’ healthcare: a lived-experience perspective","authors":"Wren Aves","doi":"10.1332/147867323x16881441383633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867323x16881441383633","url":null,"abstract":"The healthcare experience of many people carrying the label ‘borderline personality disorder (BPD)’ is one of exclusion, discrimination and neglect. The letters ‘BPD’ replace our very humanity, trampling our right to receive evidence-based, appropriate, lawful and compassionate care. Within mental health services our pain, distress, unusual experiences and self-harm/suicidal actions have been reconceptualised as ‘behavioural’ issues, encouraging the promotion of punitive and cruel responses from professionals in an attempt to discourage us from seeking help. ‘Responsibilisation’ narratives, which prioritise personal independence over all else, legitimise institutional neglect. We are told suicide is a choice we have the capacity to make, while care is actively withheld to avoid us becoming dependent on support. Despite the rising suicide rates of people labelled with a personality disorder diagnosis in the UK, our risk continues to be downplayed; rewritten as a risk of death by ‘misadventure’; and accepted by services and coroners as a justifiable outcome of so-called ‘less is more’ care plans. This article explores the current mental health service landscape in which prejudice and stigma direct ‘BPD’ care through the creation and maintenance of clinical mythology, which despite its popularity across healthcare teams, is not supported by ongoing research findings and recommendations.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90281385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A history of borderline: disorder at the heart of psychiatry","authors":"D. Jones","doi":"10.1332/147867323x16871713092130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867323x16871713092130","url":null,"abstract":"This article suggests that to appreciate some of the conundrums that surround ‘borderline personality disorder’ (BPD), we need to understand more about its history and the contexts and cultures in which it arose, consolidated and proliferated. Previous work on the development of personality disorder diagnoses (Jones, 2016) points to their emergence and shape being determined by the interaction of a multiplicity of forces including the needs of distressed individuals and communities; the manoeuvring of professional groups seeking to provide solutions to that distress and the cultural, public and media representations and responses to those problems and the proposed solutions.\u0000This single article can only begin to outline some of the key issues and will focus on the emergence of the diagnosis within the discourses of psychiatry. As we will see in the case of BPD, like other, so-called, disorders of personality, there are connections to major social changes; in particular to some of the anxieties raised by urbanisation and industrialisation and later processes of deindustrialisation and their impacts on people’s lives and identities.\u0000The article argues that significant roots of the diagnosis can be traced back to major fault lines in the discipline of psychiatry and unresolved questions about its own borders. Is psychiatry a branch of the medical profession or is it a cross-disciplinary endeavour that centres the mind as an object of study and treatment, which cannot merely be located in the individual but is instead immanently connected to the social and cultural world?","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72922929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are you borderline or did you grow up without a racial identity? Black mixed-race identity disturbance and an unstable sense of self","authors":"Cassandra Lovelock","doi":"10.1332/147867321x16869242475575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867321x16869242475575","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on the lived experience of the author to discuss the Black mixed-raced experience of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), particularly in relation to the BPD symptom of troubled identities. This article argues that what psychiatry pathologises as a troubled identity within BPD is actually an everyday experience for a mixed-race person growing up between cultures. This article goes on to discuss Black mixed-race people’s identity through a lens of performativity, how this presents and is weaponised in psychiatry, and why it is important for psychiatry to understand Black mixed-race identities.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80680311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Serving life due to borderline personality disorder","authors":"_ _","doi":"10.1332/147867321x16869242230927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867321x16869242230927","url":null,"abstract":"A personal account of the inability to discard the borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis decades after it has been applied. The impact of a BPD diagnosis continues long after discharge from treatment services. The author seeks a route map out of BPD labelling but there is no process to follow.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89187752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It’s not my sense of self that’s unstable, it’s the world’s sense of me: the harms of the construct of ‘personality disorders’ towards transgender communities","authors":"Hattie Porter","doi":"10.1332/147867321x16862340840414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/147867321x16862340840414","url":null,"abstract":"Research indicates transgender people are more likely to be diagnosed with a personality disorder than cisgender people. While this interrelationship is complex and multifaceted, this article discusses the disproportionate rates of personality disorder diagnosis in transgender people as rooted within social and historical contexts; suggesting transgender people are not more likely to have a personality disorder, rather they are more likely to be diagnosed with a personality disorder.\u0000Transgender identities have historically been framed as a manifestation of mental illness as opposed to an identity and inherent aspect of personhood. This is argued to confine understanding of transgender identities to the parameters of pathology, silencing and marginalising transgender communities. I suggest the disproportionate rate of diagnosis of personality disorders in transgender people is an extension of this historical pathologisation.\u0000Clinician bias may contribute to inappropriate diagnosis of personality disorders in transgender people due to personal values and unfamiliarity with transgender experiences. However, bias is also more deeply rooted within the construct of personality disorders itself, which appears to inherently pathologise deviation from rigid gender norms and expectations. This has implications for the ethical and ontological basis of the diagnostic construct.","PeriodicalId":29710,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Psychosocial Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87370212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}