Speakers & Abstracts

• Sofia Jeppsson: Different dissociations and philosophical distinctions

When philosophers go mad, we tend to use our philosophical tools to analyze our madness. These philosophical analyses may compete with or merely complement psychiatric ones. In any case, philosophy often carves up psychopathological phenomena along different lines than psychiatry does. I have already discussed and published on experiencing reality falling apart and different realities. There’s an interesting philosophical distinction, with some clinical implications, between doubting regular facts and doubting the very bedrock on which regular beliefs depend. In this talk, I will discuss two other, and related, philosophical distinctions; retaining or losing your self, and retaining or losing a sense of (direct) agency. When diagnosing someone with derealization/depersonalization, psychiatry places great weight on “reality-testing” being intact, the person isn’t full-out psychotic or delusional. However, the DSM criteria run together a bunch of phenomena that are quite different from a philosophical standpoint. Derealization might occur even if you experience your self as intact. Moreover, you may experience your mental self as intact while feeling estranged from your body. Finally, you may be estranged from certain parts of your mental life while retaining a strong core self. There are also corresponding agency problems. For the person who tries to handle themself, to plan and act and navigate the world while suffering strange experiences, these differences may be as important as the difference between having or losing one’s “reality-testing” capacity.

• Mikaela D. Gabriel: Kisapniaq: Exploring the evidence for ceremony and mental health care for Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Kisapniaq is the Mi’kmaq word for dawn, indicating an advancing and growing insight into the presence and importance of ceremony in mental healthcare interventions for Indigenous Peoples. This talk will inform, address, discuss, and promote the importance of ceremony within, and for, mental health care delivery and perspectives for Indigenous Peoples in Canada. This talk will have key highlights and insights from my own research that identifies the many ways ceremonies assist in emotional arousal and regulation; promotes mental clarity; impacts and supports positive identity and belonging; assists in trauma healing and post-traumatic growth and meaning-making; and how these approaches help Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners alike. I will add clinical reflections and perspectives, and a review of substantiating literature to support evidence and claims.

• Alexandre Baril: Radical and Critical Approach to Rethinking Suicidality: Reconceptualizing Suicide Prevention Through the Lens of Suicidism

I argue that suicidal people are oppressed by structural suicidism. Suicidism and its preventionist script, founded on what I call “compulsory aliveness” aiming to save lives at all costs, reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death through forms of silencing, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups, such as Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans, disabled and neurodivergent people, for whom suicide prevention increases the structural violence they experience. I also argue that suicidism aims to impose a will to live that makes suicidal people’s desire for death abnormal, irrational and unintelligible from a sanist perspective, except for those cast, based on ableist, ageist and capitalist norms, as “unsalvageable” subjects, such as disabled/sick/ill/old people. In their case, the desire for death is considered normal and rebranded as medical assistance in dying. Through an argument according to which supporting assisted suicide for all suicidal people can better prevent unnecessary deaths, I propose to rethink our conceptualizations of both suicide and assisted suicide. Drawing on trans-affirmative approaches, I propose a suicide-affirmative approach that allows for genuine accompaniment of suicidal individuals. By offering a queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, I invite us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an antisuicidist and intersectional framework.

The workshop, organized by Larisa Svirsky, Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien, and Zoey Lavallee, is co-sponsored by the Centre de Recherche en Éthique, Montréal (CRÉ), the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto (C4E), and the Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency (CRC-IAE).