Journal of Integrative and Innovative Humanities

Towards a Feminist Standpoint in Refugee Mental Health Research

Laura Gallo Tapias — 2024-05-31

Historically, psychiatry has been criticized by feminist activists and scholars as a patriarchal and misogynist discipline. I argue that feminist approaches can contribute to refugee mental health research by questioning some of its epistemological assumptions, by centering the experiences of women and other marginalized groups, and by acknowledging the social, cultural and political dimensions in the production of scientific knowledge about refugees, potentially bridging the gap between academia and activism in ways that are relevant to the subjects involved.

This paper includes 1) an overview of some contributions that feminist scholarship has made to the fields of mental health and refugee research, 2) a critical reflection on the intersections between psychiatry and migration studies, highlighting how gender has been read as a binary category used primarily to compare differences between sexes, and 3) a discussion of possible future directions for broadening the scope of refugee mental health research.

A Phenomenological Approach to Understanding Different Perceptual Interests

Shirley Huang — 2024-05-31

Understanding patients’ experiences of illness is critical to successful and holistic treatment. It is especially important in illnesses associated with diagnosis delays and mismanagement, like endometriosis. Endometriosis affects ten percent of reproductive age females globally but remains poorly recognized due to a lack of understanding from society and the healthcare system, an under-appreciation of women’s pain, and stigmatization. The broader structural implications of the paucity in research and physician training reveal neglect of patient embodiment and denial of women’s pain within medicine. By focusing on the history of endometriosis, the way it has been conceptualized through patient and physician perspectives, and the way it is part of a larger history of dismissing women’s pain, we examine the ways in which a phenomenological approach bridges the differences in perception between patient and physician as well as patient and society.

fMRI and Endocrinological Studies of Depression and Anxiety Following the Birth or Adoption of a Child

Meghan Riley — 2024-05-31

This paper reviews selected literature between 2000 and 2015 on efforts, through fMRIs and endocrinological studies, to ascertain the causes of depression and anxiety following the birth or adoption of a child and to improve treatment. Typically, only the brains of postpartum women have been studied to determine whether depression and anxiety after the birth or adoption of a child can be associated with changes in the brain. Similarly, endocrinology studies have been limited to women who have recently given birth, and sometimes result in sexist stereotypes about both the causes and impacts of postpartum depression and anxiety, which may compound barriers to recovery. Studying only postpartum women’s brains and attempting to isolate a cause particular to women’s hormones contributes to damaging stereotypes of women, is likely to discourage men from seeking help, and to date does not seem to be productive in leading to effective treatment. Further, the lack of attention to social factors may result in less effective treatment. To improve diagnosis and treatment and to move towards a more equitable model of science, diagnosis of postpartum depression should examine the role of social factors, include others experiencing parental depression besides postpartum women as subjects, and avoid essentialist conclusions.

Disability Politics and Reproductive Critique in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

Theodora Danylevich — 2024-05-31

This essay takes a reproductive justice lens, together with the analytical and liberatory insights of intersectional literary and cultural disability studies, to unearth an archive of medical eugenics exercised via non-consensual sterilization in Gayl Jones’s 1975 novel, Corregidora. My analysis also accounts for the ways in which the intimate family unit or couple can serve as a site where historical/state violence is reproduced and perpetuated, troubling the notion of a private sphere, particularly when it comes to Black Americans. Finally, I consider the stakes of such a reading of Jones’s novel for feminist health humanities and the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights and justice in the United States.

Sandra Cavallo Miller. Out of Patients: A Novel. Lincoln, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 2022. 256 pages. Paperback.

Seona Kim — 2024-05-31

Editorial Article Vol.4 No.1

2024-05-31