A recent USA Today article described a report from a Department of Defense think tank study that suggested that President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin has “neurological abnormalities” and, perhaps, an Autism Spectrum Disorder. The report, part of a project entitled “Body Leads,” which claims to use analysis of bodily behavior to suggest underlying neurological states, was originally written …
Tag Archives: Politics
Listening with Veena Das to Ordinary Ethics
Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty
by Veena Das
Fordham University Press, 2014. 255 pages
In Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham 2014) we listen with Veena Das to ordinary ethics in challenged lives of poverty, illness, and family relations; and in three often conflicting registers of (a) advocacy, (b) moral engagement, and (c) acknowledgement of inherent uncertainties (in the very fabric …
Psychiatry After Ferguson
What role should mental health care professionals play in helping heal psychical wounds exposed in the aftermath of Ferguson and New York?
This question lies at the heart of calls that emerged from within psychiatry, psychology, social work, and other mental health professions over the weeks since grand jury deliberations ended, and protests began, in cities across the country. Professional …
Daniel Defert’s Une vie politique (A Political Life)
This article is part of the series: Foreign correspondents
Une vie politique [A Political Life]
Interviews with P. Artières and E. Favereau, with the collaboration of Joséphine Gross.
Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2014
On 25 September 1984, Daniel Defert wrote a letter to his friends proposing that they create a non-profit organization to address an emerging disease: AIDS. “In face of a medical crisis and …
Script
On January 17th 2014, Catherine Eagles, a federal judge for the Middle District of North Carolina, struck down as unconstitutional a portion of North Carolina’s 2011 Women’s Right to Know Act. The portion in question would have required abortion providers in the state to perform an ultrasound and display and describe the images presented to every woman seeking an …
Against Sick States: Ebola Protests in Austerity Spain
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over a patient almost completely hidden under the sheets of the hospital bed. The huge hospital room is deserted and empty, …