HLTHAGE 2G03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Drapetomania, Reductionism, Individualism
Document Summary
2gg3 post midterm lecture #6: race, ethnicity, and mental health. No such thing as a pure race, nor are there pure people: when does a person start or stop being a certain race, has become a serious issue with trying to identify race. Immeasurable - a category assigned by others: not measurable or real, but is a huge social identifier, importance of race is sociological not biological. But race is still meaningful: race is constructed in a relational sense, privileging some and degrading others. Western psychology and psychiatry largely structured along lines that reflect privileging of certain notions: individualism: self centeredness, self-consciousness, reductionism, mental health as individual variable, disconnected from social setting, those who define wellbeing in other terms- collectively, community-focused. Do not necessarily fit into this system. Despite assumptions about universality, many argue that knowledge about mental health is primarily euro-american in orientation: lack of objectivity facilitates cultural bias.