Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry

Paul Brodwin

ISBN 10: 0520274792 / ISBN 13: 9780520274792

Published by University of California Press, 2013

About this Item

Explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. This title traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Num Pages: 248 pages. BIC Classification: MBDC; MBPK. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 223 x 146 x 14. Weight in Grams: 346. Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry. 248 pages. Explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. This title traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Cateogry: (P) Professional & Vocational. BIC Classification: MBDC; MBPK. Dimension: 223 x 146 x 14. Weight: 346. . 2013. Paperback. . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9780520274792

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520274792
• ISBN 13: 9780520274792
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. Drawing on years of fieldwork in a community psychiatry outreach team, Brodwin traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. On the street, in staff room debates, or in private confessions, these psychiatrists and social workers confront ongoing challenges to their self-image as competent and compassionate advocates. At times they openly question the coercion and forced-dependency built into the current system of care. At other times they justify their use of extreme power in the face of loud opposition from clients. This in-depth study exposes the fault lines in today's community psychiatry. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Their commentaries about the obligatory and the forbidden also suggest ways to bridge formal bioethics and the realities of mental health practice. The experiences of these clinicians pose a single overarching question: how should we bear responsibility for the most vulnerable among us?

About the Author

Paul Brodwin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is the editor of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power, and coeditor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives.