Sean Lennon Queer Youth Suicide in Aotearoa: A Non-Pathogising Theoretical Approach to Suicide
Suicide has traditionally been understood as a mental health issue. As a subfield, suicide literature focused on queer people has investigated a wider range of factors that contribute to suicide. However, these factors are often interpreted using the minority stress model, which continues to pathologise queer experiences. Queer youth face higher levels of suicide ideation, along with homo/bi/transphobia, discrimination, and stigma. Queer youth face great challenges in their interpersonal relationships, at school or accessing healthcare as a result of engaging with the world as a queer person, all of which can increase the distress they experience. I am in the preliminary stages of doctoral research, and this presentation outlines the theoretical framework I will use to explore queer youth experiences of suicide in Aotearoa without relying on a pathologising framework. A critical suicidology framework will be used to examine the causes and impacts of social inequalities on suicide and how to disrupt them. Intersectionality will be applied to ensure that different groups of the community are represented and their experiences are understood in the context of their intersecting identities. Te Whare Tapa Whā framework will help ensure that the research is inclusive of te ao Māori (Māori worldview).
Bruce M. Z. Cohen ‘Deviant Consumptions: A Marxist Theory of Addiction’
Despite the increase in psychiatric, media, and public discourse regarding the prevalence and growing number of addictions in Western society in the twenty-first century, sociological analyses of such conspicuous behaviour has remained relatively thin on the ground. This is perhaps surprising given the mental health system’s continued inability to adequately identify and define what exactly ‘addiction’ is, or to provide effective treatments for those who have been labelled as (for example) drug, alcohol, gambling, food, social media, shopping, gaming, or sex ‘addicts’. In advance of the publication of Addiction and the Medicalisation of Conspicuous Behaviour: New Critical Perspectives (a sociological volume from Jo Reichertz, Martin Harbusch and myself, due out in 2025), this presentation performs a Marxist analysis of addiction to assess the key historical dynamics and current drivers for this form of medicalisation, including consideration of both the economic and ideological motives for pathologizing various forms of deviant consumption in capitalist society. From consideration of the early moral entrepreneurs who first named certain behaviours as addictions in the late nineteenth century, through changes to the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of their Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, to the latest tests for efficacy, this talk will also offer some useful pathways for future critical sociological research in the area.
Rachael McMahon “The Magic Pill”
Psychiatric knowledge exists as a cultural artefact of this hegemonic Western biopolitical neoliberalist society. Psychiatry, its science, its reason, its values, its perceived validating measurements, its treatment can be understood as cultural artefacts. In this paper I will examine psychiatry and unpack some of its foundations, by exploring the apparent magical abilities of psychiatry, providing a lens of lived/living experience to its understanding. In exploring the magic of psychiatric science, I will also consider the “magic” of psychiatric measurement, technology, diagnosis, and treatment. I will use the method of the “sacred” narrative (Hendry 2009) to understand the magic of psychiatry, demonstrated by a discussion of psychiatry’s cultural artefacts.
