Tag: philosophy

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Issue 22

Prolonged Grief: A New Mental Disorder?

The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) features a new diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder—used for those who, a year after a loss, still remain incapacitated by it. This addition follows more than a decade of debate. Supporters argued that the addition enables clinicians to provide much-needed help to those afflicted by what one might simply consider a too much of grief, whereas opponents insisted that one mustn’t unduly pathologize grief and reject an increasingly medicalized approach to a condition that they considered part of a normal process of dealing with loss—a process which in some simply takes longer than in others.    

By including a condition in a professional classification system, we collectively recognize it as real. Recognizing hitherto unnamed conditions can help remove certain kinds of disadvantages. Miranda Fricker emphasizes this in her discussion of what she dubs hermeneutic injustice: a specific sort of epistemic injustice that affects persons in their capacity as knowers1. Creating terms like ‘post-natal depression’ and ‘sexual harassment’, Fricker argues, filled lacunae in the collectively available hermeneutic resources that existed where names for distinctive kinds of social experience should have been. The absence of such resources, Fricker holds, put those who suffered from such experiences at an epistemic disadvantage: they lacked the words to talk about them, understand them, and articulate how they were wronged. Simultaneously, such absences prevented wrong-doers from properly understanding and facing the harm they were inflicting—e.g. those who would ridicule or scold mothers of newborns for not being happier or those who would either actively engage in sexual harassment or (knowingly or not) support the societal structures that helped make it seem as if it was something women just had to put up with. 

For Fricker, the hermeneutical disadvantage faced by those who suffer from an as-of-yet ill-understood and largely undiagnosed medical condition is not an epistemic injustice. Those so disadvantaged are not excluded from full participation in hermeneutic practices, or at least not through mechanisms of social coercion that arise due to some structural identity prejudice. They are not, in other words, hermeneutically marginalized, which for Fricker, is an essential characteristic of epistemic injustice. Instead, their situation is simply one of “circumstantial epistemic bad luck”2. Still, Fricker, too, can agree that providing labels for ill-understood conditions is valuable. Naming a condition helps raise awareness of it, makes it discursively available and, thus, a possible object of knowledge and understanding. This, in turn, can enable those afflicted by it to understand their experience and give those who care about them another way of nudging them into seeking help. 

Surely, if adding prolonged grief disorder to the DSM-5 were merely a matter of recognizing the condition and of facilitating assistance, nobody should have any qualms with it. However, the addition also turns intense grief into a mental disorder—something for whose treatment insurance companies can be billed. With this, significant forces of interest enter the scene. The DSM-5, recall, is mainly consulted by psychiatrists. In contrast to talk-therapists like psychotherapists or psychoanalysts, psychiatrists constitute a highly medicalized profession, in which symptoms—clustered together as syndromes or disorders—are frequently taken to require drugs to treat them. Adding prolonged grief disorder thus heralds the advent of research into various drug-based grief therapies. Ellen Barry of the New York Times confirms this: “naltrexone, a drug used to help treat addiction,” she reports, “is currently in clinical trials as a form of grief therapy”, and we are likely to see a “competition for approval of medicines by the Food and Drug Administration.”3

Adding diagnoses to the DSM-5 creates financial incentives for players in the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs advertised as providing relief to those so diagnosed. Surely, for various conditions, providing drug-induced relief from severe symptoms is useful, even necessary to enable patients to return to normal levels of functioning. But while drugs may help suppress feelings associated with intense grief, they cannot remove the grief. If all mental illnesses were brain diseases, they might be removed by adhering to some drug regimen or other. Note, however, that ‘mental illness’ is a metaphor that carries the implicit suggestion that just like physical illnesses, mental afflictions, too, are curable by providing the right kind of physical treatment. Unsurprisingly, this metaphor is embraced by those who stand to massively benefit from what profits they may reap from selling a plethora of drugs to those diagnosed with any of what seems like an ever-increasing number of mental disorders. But metaphors have limits. Lou Marinoff, a proponent of philosophical counselling, puts the point aptly:

Those who are dysfunctional by reason of physical illness entirely beyond their control—such as manic-depressives—are helped by medication. For handling that kind of problem, make your first stop a psychiatrist’s office. But if your problem is about identity or values or ethics, your worst bet is to let someone reify a mental illness and write a prescription. There is no pill that will make you find yourself, achieve your goals, or do the right thing.

Much more could be said about the differences between psychotherapy, psychiatry, and the newcomer in the field: philosophical counselling. Interested readers may benefit from consulting Marinoff’s work. Written in a provocative, sometimes alarmist style, it is both entertaining and—if taken with a substantial grain of salt—frequently insightful. My own view is this: from Fricker’s work, we can extract reasons to side with the proponents of adding prolonged grief disorder to the DSM-5. Creating hermeneutic resources that allow us to help raise awareness, promote understanding, and facilitate assistance is commendable. If the addition achieves that, we should welcome it. And yet, one may indeed worry that practitioners are too eager to move from the recognition of a mental condition to the implementation of therapeutic interventions that are based on the assumption that such afflictions must be understood on the model of physical disease. The issue is not whether certain mental conditions are real—they are. It is how we conceptualize them and what we think treating them requires.

No doubt, grief manifests physically. It is, however, not primarily a physical condition—let alone a brain disease. Grief is a distinctive mental condition. Apart from bouts of sadness, its symptoms typically include the loss of orientation or a sense of meaning. To overcome grief, we must come to terms with who we are or can be without the loved one’s physical presence in our life. We may need to reinvent ourselves, figure out how to be better again and whence to derive a new purpose. What is at stake is our sense of identity, our self-worth, and, ultimately, our happiness. Thinking that such issues are best addressed by popping pills puts us on a dangerous path, leading perhaps towards the kind of dystopian society Aldous Huxley imagined in his 1932 novel Brave New World. It does little to help us understand, let alone address, the moral and broader philosophical issues that trouble the bereaved and that lie at the root not just of prolonged grief but, arguably, of many so-called mental illnesses.

Footnotes:

1 For this and the following, cf. Fricker 2007, chapter 7.

2 Fricker 2007: 152

3 Barry 2022

References:

Barry, E. (2022). “How Long Should It Take to Grieve? Psychiatry Has Come Up With an Answer.” The New York Times, 03/18/2022, URL = https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/health/prolonged-grief-
disorder.html [last access: 04/05/2022])
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice. Power & the Ethics of knowing. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper Brothers.
Marinoff, L. (1999). Plato, not Prozac! New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Professor Raja Rosenhagen is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Head of Department, and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and has a broad range of philosophical interests (see here). He wrote this article a) because he was invited to do so and b) because he is currently nurturing a growing interest in philosophical counselling.

Picture Credits: CBD Oracle

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 8

Can Banksy Bring Dadaism Back To Life?

The explosion of different street art movements comes from the combined effort of various artists who practise hybrid forms of graffiti to make a mark by any means possible. But if there is one player who grabs the spotlight beyond the art world, it’s Banksy. 

A professional prankster, Banksy is a street graffiti artist and a global sensation. Banksy’s flair for street art combined with the proclivity for mystery, drama and danger ensures that every new Banksy piece ends up making headlines. Banksy’s work, ranging from Kissing Coppers and Unwelcome Intervention to Hammer Boy and Girl with a Balloon, embraces social commentary through provocative visual depictions. But the true essence, the philosophy behind his art is often related to the 20th-century art movement, dadaism. 

Dadaism or the Dada art movement began in Zurich, Switzerland in the mid-1910s. In pre-war Europe, the movement emerged as a form of protest art with congregations of artists, intellectuals and writers expressing different forms of subversion in the wake of World War I. The European avant-garde movement aimed to ridicule modern life, apply absurdity to art and question the values held by the bourgeois. 

The movement was based on some key ideas. Elaborately explained by thoughtco., three ideas were basic to the Dada movement—spontaneity, negation, and absurdity—and those three ideas were expressed in a vast array of creative chaos.

Spontaneity was an appeal to individuality and a violent cry against the system. Even the best art is an imitation; even the best artists are dependent on others, they said. Romanian poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) wrote that literature is never beautiful because beauty is dead; it should be a private affair between the writer and himself. Only when art is spontaneous can it be worthwhile, and then only to the artist.

To a Dadaist, negation meant sweeping and cleaning away the art establishment by spreading demoralization. Morality, they said, has given us charity and pity; morality is an injection of chocolate into the veins of all. Good is no better than bad; a cigarette butt and an umbrella are as exalted as God. Everything has illusory importance; man is nothing, everything is of equal unimportance; everything is irrelevant, nothing is relevant. 

And in the end, everything is absurd. Everything is paradoxical; everything opposes harmony.

A pioneer of the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp, incorporated these ideas of the movement to critique establishments that decided what art ought to be and how it ought to be created. In doing so, he combined spontaneity, negation and absurdity and came up with what some consider the first piece of conceptual art ever created, Fountain. 

Fountain is a standard white urinal that was signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’ in black. It is a part of Duchamp’s series of work called readymades where ordinary objects would be designated as works of art. Fountain is one of Duchamp’s most famous works and a classic example of dada. By submitting an object like a urinal that is bought in the plumber’s shop as an entry for an art exhibition, he intended to test what people thought of as art. He wanted to change the idea of what was conventionally considered art and assert that the artistic expression was of greater significance than the object of art created. Thus, the dada movement was one of the first art movements that challenged the foundations of art. 

Although the movement did not represent particular styles of art, it favoured collaboration, spontaneity and chance in the process of creation. As traditional dadaists intended to reject traditional forms of artistic expression like painting and sculpting, they worked on ready-made objects, created photomontage and made use of non-conventional mediums. 

While the lifespan of the dada movement was known to be short-lived, Banksy’s creations and artistic stunts have brought this movement back to life. In one particular stunt, Banksy made use of an invention of the dada movement, auto-destructive art. The dada notion behind auto-destructive art comes from the idea that it aims to either redefine art or ridicule it.

In a 2018 Sotheby’s art auction in London, Banksy’s famous image Girl with a Balloon, which depicts the image of a girl reaching out for a red, heart-shaped balloon, was sold for $1.4 million. A few moments later, the picture started shredding and sliding down in strips. Sotheby’s claimed that it had been “Banksy’d” through the use of a hidden shredder in the photo frame. The act is viewed as a dada act because it was an attempt to critique the pretentiousness of the art world and show how easy it was to transform what people considered precious art into strips of paper. 

From critiquing consumerism and capitalism to calling out social absurdities, the elusive graffiti artist is often critiqued for falling prey to the cultural system. The stunt of shredding the image Girl with a Balloon led to its increase in value in the art market. Thus, a stunt of provocation ended up being co-opted into an exhibition. While past movements have influenced the future trajectory of art, it is important to remember that cultural sensibilities and audience interaction with art are as important as the art itself. 

Shrishti is a Politics, Philosophy and Economics major at Ashoka University. In her free time, you’ll find her cooking, dancing or photographing.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Uncategorized

The Most Powerful Response to Any Situation: Love

By Raja Rosenhagen

The topic of love seemed like an obvious choice. I just taught two classes on it over the summer—one for graduate level students,one as part of the summer semester offerings for our undergraduates. It was deeply rewarding to be with these students, to reflect with them on what love and friendship are (or should be), on how various kinds of love relate to our reasons, and on how the quality of our attention profoundly shapes our everyday ways of interacting with others. Many students took these reflections as invitations to self-examine, to apply the conceptual tools they had acquired throughout the course to their lives and ask: How doI relate to others? Can I live up to the various ideals we had tried to articulate? In what ways am I falling short, and why? Some students wrote to me afterwards and said that for them, the class had served as a safe space in which to reflect upon things that matter, on issues, moreover, that do come to the fore even more forcefully than otherwise now, i.e. in a time in which humans across the globe are going through a pandemic and are thus either confined to being with their loved ones a lot more than usual or are separated from or even at the risk of losing them. 

Not every philosophy class is or must be an exercise of earnest self-examination. However, a class that stimulates one to reflect upon how to live well can be a source of personal growth, and serve to sow, one hopes, the seeds for a better society. That we need one is obvious to everyone who looks—and opportunities abound—at the suffering of the diseased, the poor, the marginalized, and all those who have nobody to lobby for them. Many of us prefer to look away or focus on issues we can manage, things we feel we can cope with. This can be healthy. After all, our capacity to look at the various kinds of suffering that our ways of life create or help sustain is limited. There may only be so much we can take, of the sadness, the anger, and the despair that looking outward empathetically must reveal, and of the emotional exhaustion that ensues. 

But we must look somewhere. And even if we can’t, given the pandemic, go out, travel, and explore it, the world doesn’t halt at our doorstep. Numerous media outlets and social media platforms provide a permanent influx of news and entertainment that vie for our attention, approval, or emotional responses. Of course, the virtual world allows us to be selective. We can choose where we look and can easily look away if things get under our skins. But the satisfaction virtual escapism provides is short-lived. After hours of watching Netflix or chasing down various debates on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, most of us are left exhausted, left with a stale aftertaste, the feeling that real life is shallow, too complicated or burdensome, or with the nagging thought that a lot of precious time was just wasted. Even if after spending time on consuming various news items, one may well be in a better position to understand certain issues, through such consumption, nothing of substance changes. More distracted, more polarized, or overwhelmed, we find ourselves where we left as we begin to direct our selective gaze into the virtual outward. We remain saddled with the real pain around us, confronted with those who have legitimate demands on us, with urgent emails to respond to and many other tasks to complete. It is a change for the better that we vaguely imagine and strongly desire. But as we resurface from the virtual, we must concede that nothing has changed, nothing has been achieved.

Ultimately, trying to mask out the real world is futile. For the pain and suffering we try to escape, are anyway, not just out there. They live in our own homes and families (think of the uncle, cousin, or unresolved conflict that everyone knows but nobody talks about), in our relationships, in how we handle ourselves in them. So we cannot escape, or not for long. So where should we look? How can we deal? What must happen for things to become better?

Once we raise these questions and make time to be with them, we realize that the most powerful responses turn on love. Giving time and attention to others, Simone Weil thinks, is not just a way of showing empathy, it is a way to love. Iris Murdoch concurs, adding that love is a quality of attachment, that directing our attention at what is good and valuable in the world and in others is a source of tremendous energy, and that love, construed as just attention, enables us to act well. 

So we can ask: whom or what do I love? Do I pay attention to it? Do I love what I pay attention to? How do I nourish my love, how can I refine it? What have I done today to expand it? Is there someone who needs my compassionate kindness? How is my neighbour, my grandmother, a friend that I haven’t heard from in a long time, how are things for the istrivala, the kachravala, or the shopkeeper of the corner store? What would happen if I asked them?

It is an old mistake to think that we cannot solve large or systemic societal problems by making small steps. Everyone can make small steps and many such steps jointly give rise to powerful movements. We must not think that believing this, and acting on it, is naïve, or that it can’t be that simple. Such a response-apart from being one of the biggest obstacles to change—is itself naïve. For how can it be reasonable to hope that things will change for the better while we do not? Surely, changing our ways by seeking to expand our ability to love nudges us out of our comfort zone. We may be afraid as such expansion it may seem to make us vulnerable. But it makes us stronger. It helps us turn into the best version of who we are. It serves to build community, to create structures of responsibility, compassion, and human connection, it implements life-affirming values and thus strengthens the various connections we form with those around us. This, I believe, is by far the best response to the pain we face. And it is available to us always. We need not wait. We can start today, and it barely costs anything. Love NOW!

Rosenhagen is the Associate Professor Philosophy and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University. He specializes in Philosophy of Perception, Science, Mind, & Epistemology.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).