Mental Health

mental health

E X P L O R I N G

Encouraging productive interaction among people from diverse perspectives, promoting new and continual exploration of issues relating to mental health and broader issues relating to the body/brain/mind/self, and facilitating the new openings which emerge from the sharing of perspectives.

Mental health is an increasingly significant intellectual and practical concern of people in both academic and social/ cultural/political contexts. In recognition of this, Serendip, the Center for Science in Society, the School of Social Work and Social Research, and other groups at Bryn Mawr College are working together to encourage productive conversation and scholarship about issues of mental health, both general and specific. This, like other Serendip sections, is a work in progress, expected to evolve in response to interests and contributions of visitors. Comments, suggestions, and contributions can be sent to Serendip, to Laura Cyckowski, or to Paul Grobstein.

What's new

February 2007 - These pages originated in 2001 with the objective of providing a broad base of resources for all aspects of mental health (click here for access to prior materials). We have reorganized materials to focus on four areas:

"From the inside" ... materials needed to supplement traditional medical and clinical perspectives by providing accounts of relevant internal experiences
"Neurobiology" ... materials that help to clarify the relationship between the brain and behavior, including internal experiences
"Culture and Behavior" ... materials directed at exploring the relationship between social and cultural organization and individual behavior/internal experiences
"Intersections" ... materials aimed at developing broader perspectives that incorporate different insights reached from each of a variety of viewpoints

Some starting points...

Individuals and Culture - The relationship between cultures and individuals and the tensions that arise between the two is emerging as a focus of exploration in various contexts on Serendip. The materials found here address and attempt to focus these issues.

Models of Mental Health - "...People argue about the relative merits of the various perspectives ... Such critiques can be productive but are only a step in a larger task: to develop broader perspectives that can productively incorporate the different useful insights reached from each of a variety of different points of view..."

Making the Unconscious Conscious, and Vice Versa: A Bi-directional Bridge Between Neuroscience/Cognitive Science and Psychotherapy? - "Just as the unconscious and the conscious are engaged in a process of evolving stories for separate reasons and using separate styles, so too have been and will continue to be neuroscience/cognitive science and psychotherapy..."

Diversity and Deviance: A Biological Perspective - "... if we look around and try to describe life as we actually see it, its most obvious characteristic is not order. It is instead diversity..."

Culture as Disability- "...Everyone in any culture is subject to being labeled and disabled... A disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons... [T]his paper is not about disabled persons. It is about the powers of culture to disable..."

Mind and Body: Rene Descartes to William James -"Much of the intellectual history of psychology as both a scientific and a clinical enterprise has involved the attempt to come to grips with these two problems of mind and body..."

Exhibits

	Measure for Measure: An Artistic Exploration of Eating Disorders, Body Image, and the Self by Janna Stern - a gallery of images and on-line forum exploring the Mythology of Eating Disorders.
	The "Nature" of Desire - a research project by Rachel Berman '01. "...The way we conceptualize, say 'the urge to love' is ...beautiful? Sad? Uplifting? All these are human constructs of the brain. So what's left to say about the 'nature' of the 'urge to love'?"
	Time to Think? - The question in a larger context: Brain=behavior? "...the finding that thinking 'takes time' had a significant impact, suggesting that thinking, like other aspects of behavior/human experience, actually had a material basis..."
	Ambiguous Figures - "...'ambiguity' is not only the province of the artist or the enjoyer of novelty..."
	Individuals and Cultures - a synthesis of materials that attempt to focus the issues that arise between cultures and invidiuals, and promote new ways of thinking about the relationship between the two.