We’re pleased to introduce a new website feature: the PsySR Blog, a forum for PsySR members to share their timely thoughts and analysis on social justice issues of the day from a psychological perspective. To contribute, send your brief essay (400-800 words) to blogs@psysr.org (along with your email address and few lines about yourself). We hope to add new essays every few weeks, so please check back here regularly. An archive of past PsySR Blog entries is available HERE.
Open Letter to Candidates by Neil Wollman and Abigail Fuller
Thus far, your debate on the war in Iraq--like the public and media debate--has focused mainly on the questions of progress in security and political reconciliation, with some limited discussion on the war's effects on the U.S. economy and on our military preparedness elsewhere. The consensus seems to be that, yes, there has been progress in Iraq on security and in the political realm, with debate centering on how much. You seem to agree there have been some negative effects on the United States, with debate on whether the benefits of the war outweigh the costs.
But you seem blind to other criteria that should be as important in judging this war and guiding our future foreign policy. We speak of criteria that might generally be termed "quality of life" concerns: poverty, inflation, unemployment, the rebuilding of infrastructure (including schools and hospitals), the quality of the educational and health systems (including monitoring of childhood malnutrition and deaths from public health problems), ransom kidnappings and other crimes, and the brain drain of professionals, to give some wide-ranging examples. Unfortunately, such humanitarian concerns are treated mainly as peripheral issues worthy only of occasional mention, not major debate.Read More »
Disability and Human Rights by Daniel Holland
Disability issues represent one of the most urgent human rights concerns of our time. There are currently about 600 million people with disabilities on the globe, with a disproportionate number of these people living in poverty and in developing regions. Unlike many other minority conditions such as ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation, disability constitutes an experience that any individual can begin having at any point in life, though it is an experience that is statistically more likely as one gets older. In fact, people with disabilities will be one of the most rapidly growing minority groups on the planet in the coming decades as the global population ages. The growth of disability as a human rights issue, therefore, stands to benefit every citizen of every nation.
To date, psychologists have not been highly visible on the forefront of this human rights movement. There are likely a number of reasons for this. Psychologists (particularly clinical and counseling psychologists) are often educated and trained within a clinical and pathology-oriented paradigm. Such clinical perspectives on disability often place the burden of improvement on the individual: the person with the disability is expected to work to transcend the condition in order to rejoin the non-disabled majority. The mythic narrative accompanying such perspectives involves the determined and stoic person with a disability who, through force of will and effort, learns to walk again, or returns from the presumed abyss of mental illness, or recovers from a brain injury, leaving the uncomely sidelines of “the disabled” to mix with “the normal people” in the main. Read More »
An Archive of Past PsySR Blog Entries is Available HERE.
We welcome contributions of new material and recommendations of new links from PsySR members. Please send an email to info@psysr.org and clearly identify the issue being addressed. Contributions received may be edited for space or combined in summary form with other contributions on the same topic.