Abigail Gosselin – författare

Mental illness stigma is rooted in a perceived lack of agency, but stigma itself undermines agency. While most philosophical accounts of the matter are concerned with the question of how much agency a person with mental illness has, this book asks how we can enhance the agency of people with mental illness.Humanizing Mental Illness explains and explores these connections, arguing that all of us can and should adjust our social practices to enhance the agency of people with mental illness. This agency is complicated and nuanced, as it is often directly constrained due to a person's symptoms and indirectly constrained due to stigma. Abigail Gosselin, both a scholar in the field of social philosophy and a person with a psychiatric disability, illustrates the importance of social interaction for developing and exercising agency. By overcoming mental illness stigma and by adopting certain epistemic and moral virtues, we can interact with people who have mental illness in ways that help enhance their agency and enable them to flourish.Humanizing Mental Illness demonstrates that we need to challenge our explicit and implicit biases and learn to interact with mental illness in more intentional, supportive, and inclusive ways.

This book considers what responsibilities affluent individuals have toward global poverty, given that global poverty is a problem with structural, political causes, and one that generally requires collective action. While philosophers have tended to address responsibility for global poverty in exclusively moral, political, or legal ways, Gosselin examines the intersection of these three approaches, giving a comprehensive look at affluent individuals' relationships to poverty. She thus provides both a survey of existing literature on responsibility for global poverty, as well as a positive proposal for a pluralistic and differentiated account of individual duties based on a person's moral agency, her roles within collective groups (including her occupational and civic roles), and her institutional identities as citizen and consumer. While the agents most responsible for addressing global poverty are collectives like governments and corporations, individuals have various kinds of duties to ensure that relevant groups carry out their collective responsibilities. Gosselin examines three kinds of duties at length, each with its own chapter: beneficence, redress, and institutional justice. Situating each duty in the relevant literature (moral, legal, and political philosophy), she explains how the duty is justified, who are its appropriate duty-bearers, and what actions it requires of individuals. Real-life examples that analyze causes, identify responsible agents, and explain the nature of this responsibility show the applicability of each duty to particular situations of poverty. The final chapter summarizes the many and differentiated duties individuals have based on their moral, institutional, and role identities, which in turn are based on how they are situated with respect to the global poor. A suggested list of particular actions individuals should take is given.

Although mental health is a better understood, more widely discussed topic in our society today, a degree of stigmatization persists, especially in severe cases with links to homelessness, job loss, poverty and human rights. It is also still present in environments such as the workforce, healthcare settings and educational environments, and often internalized by the sufferer themselves. This book provides a philosophical account of what mental illness stigma is, why it persists, what harms it causes to people subject to public stigma or who internalize stigma in themselves, and what can be done about it. It analyzes the process of stigmatization, both public and internalized, in the twenty-first century Western culture, especially in the United States - including the process of stereotyping, the expressive harm of stereotypes, the role of social norms in creating adaptive preferences and shaping behaviour, the moral distancing and status loss involved with social exclusion and dehumanization, and the harm of discrimination.

Examines the forms of support, resources, and opportunities a person with mental illness requires to have the resilience needed for mental health recovery.While resilience is traditionally understood as an inner trait that individuals possess inside themselves, Mental Health Resilience argues that resilience should be seen as the product of social factors, where other individuals and institutions provide the resources, opportunities, and support that enable resilience. Resilience is also partly a matter of justice, as people can only be resilient in addressing their vulnerabilities when they are given adequate resources and opportunities, and in just ways. Seen in this light, Abigail Gosselin examines what a person who has mental illness needs to have the resilience required for mental health recovery and for coping with life challenges in general. With its focus on the social and political conditions of resilience, Mental Health Resilience will appeal to fields such as social philosophy, feminist political philosophy, philosophy of psychiatry, medical humanities, bioethics, and disability studies.