elfinblaze

Exporting trauma: can the talking cure do more harm than good?

When disaster strikes aid agencies are increasingly focusing on mental health as well as food and shelter. But without cultural understanding, pushing western treatment can do damage. Cue the rise of the humanitarian anthropologist ...

A few years ago Andrew Solomon had to get into a wedding bed with a ram. An entire village, taking a day off from farming, danced around the unlikely couple to a pounding drumbeat, draping them both in cloth until Solomon began to think he was going to faint. At this point the ram was slaughtered along with two cockerels, and Solomon’s naked body was drenched in the animals’ blood, before being washed clean by the village women spitting water onto him.

Solomon had been taking part in a traditional Senegalese ceremony to exorcise depression as research for his book The Noonday Demon. “I discovered that depression exists universally, but the ways that it’s understood, treated, conceptualised or even experienced can vary a great deal from culture to culture,” he says now. He describes being the subject of the ceremony as “one of the most fascinating experiences of my life”.

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Just saving this article here, because I've just recently been wondering about non-Western, non-biomedical treatments for mental health, because it's exactly in the psychological departments where our health care knowledge is the most limited. This whole topic almost makes me want to use my anthropology degree to do some research, but I feel like I need to bolster the medical side of my knowledge first...

Big news for the day: UN Human Rights Council passes gay rights resolution.

On the final day of the United Nation Human Rights Council's latest 18-day session, a resolution was passed that seeks to combat acts of violence and discrimination around the world based on a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

The resolution calls for a worldwide study to be conducted into discriminatory laws and practices based on sexual preferences and to look at how human rights law could be put to use to end related violence and human rights violations.

Read the rest of the article, unless you're a nerd like me and want to read the source at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights website instead: Council establishes mandate on Côte d'Ivoire, adopts protocol to child rights treaty, requests study on discrimination and sexual orientation.

Ok, so it's a resolution, not a declaration, but it's an opening for discussion. And you can bet that activists will rely on it in lobbying for more rights.

Up until now, the UN has been very reluctant to even consider the rights of the rainbow community, mostly because of resistance from the US, China, and Russia combined. So as it stood before today, there was not a single mention of this community in international law. Not even a mention! That's why I walked out of my Human Rights and International Law classes at university depressed, feeling like I didn't even exist. Because according to the UN, I didn't. This is a start.

So even though you are hardly a haven yourself, thank you South Africa for tabling the resolution. Thank you to all the countries that supported it, and thank you to both of my home countries, Germany and Australia, for co-sponsoring the draft resolution.

[EDIT: Autostraddle explains it well, the significance and what it means. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets that, "oh, hey, I'm considered human now, am I?" feeling.]



( Full text from the relevant part of the UN news account copied and pasted under cut )

Because we can all do with some good news once in a while, and because truth really is stranger than fiction:

A student was mugged in an alley in Sydney, but the attackers were chased off by ninjas.

( article under the cut )

Saving this, because it's funny. And because it's SO true: this is exactly what it was like yesterday and the kind of jokes going around.



The day the country blew into town
JOHN HUXLEY
September 24, 2009

IT WILL be remembered as the day Blue Cow turned red, Green Valley turned orange, White Bay turned pink, and Greystanes … well, even Greystanes turned a lighter shade of grey.

It will be remembered as an extraordinary end-of-the-world sort of day when the bush came to Sydney - just like for the Easter Show, except this time it brought along a thank-you present. An estimated 4000 tonnes of topsoil.

A woman from Dulwich Hill rang the ABC to say she could see Armageddon through her kitchen skylight. A farmer reported mud falling on Tamworth. A Balmoral man went missing crossing the Esplanade.

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This was Monday's "Heckler" and I was so amused I had to save it.

Watch out or I'll cut you off

Pete Malicki
July 6, 2009

EVERYONE'S always banging on about road rage. One idiot cuts off another idiot and before you know it they're playing fisticuffs in the middle of the Pacific Highway.

If, like me, you don't drive a car, you might suffer the blight of walk rage.

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Quote that jumped out at me today:

"It's a fact of life that many same-sex couples already happily live in the suburbs behind pink picket fences. Invalidating their choice to integrate into mainstream society by denying them the right to marry is a form of cultural abuse that's just as contemptible when it comes from the ideological left as it is when it comes from the righteous right."

"Despite all the 'baggage' marriage has, despite all the pressure some partners are under to wed, there are many partners who choose to marry, even though they know their union only has a 50% chance of lasting. Why do they do this? They do it because marriage is a symbol of hope, faith and confidence in the future. Marriage says the happiness that comes from a romantic bond can last and grow, and if it fails, can come again. Marriage is inherently optimistic. And even if that optimism is too often naive or betrayed it still somehow keeps on inspiring us, generation after generation. In a world of crisis, insecurity and despair, younger heterosexual people are returning to marriage, I would suggest, for its optimism. Denying same-sex partners a chance to share in this is one of the cruellest aspects of marriage discrimination."

[From Rodney Croome.]