A Right to Understand Injustice: Epistemology and the “Right to the Truth” in International Human Rights Discourse

People's “right to truth” or their “right to know” about their government's human rights abuses is a growing consensus in human rights discourses and a fertile area of work in international and humanitarian law. In most discussions of this right to know the truth, it is commonly seen as requiring the state or international institutions to provide access to evidence of the violations. In this paper, I argue that such a right naturally has many epistemic aspects, and the tools of social epistemology can be helpful in elucidating what such a right entails. As a beginning for this project, I draw on those resources to argue that the right to know the truth is only meaningful if it includes a right to understand the abuses, and that such understanding can only come through the development of community epistemic capacities. Given this, I further argue that the state has a duty to support the development of these capacities, and that a critical place for beginning this process is in public schools.     

Disclosing Huntington’s Genetic Testing Results in the Context of Intellectual Disability and Guardianship: Using the Family Illness Narrative to Guide the Flow of Information

A diagnosis of Huntington’s disease has broad social, vocational, reproductive and psychological implications. The ability to accurately diagnose the illness via genetic testing is not new. However, given a persistent lack of robustly effective interventions, it remains an area of ethical concern. The difficulty is compounded in cases of intellectual disability. This paper presents a case of genetic testing for Huntington’s disease conducted on a patient with intellectual disability with guardian consent, but without the patient’s direct knowledge and how the family illness narrative and psychiatric care were employed in the eventual disclosure of the patient’s diagnosis and subsequent management.     

What Right to Die?

This letter first discusses two meanings of a "right to die." In the popular sense, the term refers to a right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. In the strict sense, the term signifies an affirmative right to obtain death--a right to suicide. The letter then explores the legal implications of a suicide right. This right would extend to competent adults, mature minors, and probably also incompetent persons. Counselors would have to inform clients of the suicide option. Intervention to prevent suicide could trigger civil liability. Suicidal intentions would not justify involuntary commitment. Consent would become a defense to homicide.     

Crying as a Form of Parent–Infant Communication in the Context of Maternal Depression

In cases of maternal depression certain complex factors interfere with communication with the child. The present study sought to investigate forms of parent–infant communication in families in which the mother was experiencing postpartum depression. Particular emphasis was placed on analysis of crying patterns and on methods employed by parents to soothe the child. The study sample comprised 15 families in which the mother had a diagnosis of postpartum depression. Semi-structured interviews were performed, followed by qualitative content analysis. Results showed that depressed mothers—and, at times, their husbands—reported difficulties in communication with their child, particularly in distinguishing different types of cries and in ways of soothing the infant. Postpartum depression is discussed as a specific diagnosis, beyond its relational aspect, which affects the family as a whole.     

Complexities in Adjustment Patterns among the “Best and the Brightest”: Risk and Resilience in the Context of High Achieving Schools

Youth in high achieving schools (HAS) are at elevated risk for serious adjustment problems—including internalizing and externalizing symptoms and substance use—given unrelenting pressures to be “the best.” For resilience researchers, successful risk evasion in these high-pressure settings should, arguably, be defined in terms of the absence of serious symptoms plus behaviorally manifested integrity and altruism. Future interventions should target that which is the fundamental basis of resilience: Dependable, supportive relationships in everyday settings. These must be promoted between adults and children and among them, toward enhancing positive development among youth and families in these high stress environments.     

Right to Die or Duty to Live? The Problem of Euthanasia

Argument about euthanasia in Australia intensified following the world's first legal euthanasia death of Bob Dent under the Northern Territory's short-lived Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995. This paper takes stock of the implacably opposed positions on euthanasia following Bob Dent's death, which provides a focus for the controversy, and identifies the key doctrines which separate adversaries in the euthanasia debate and their associated incommensurable intuitions.     

A Right to Die?: Ethical Dilemmas of Euthanasia

Euthanasia is considered an important social issue of the 1990s. Mental health professionals should understand the differences between voluntary, involuntary, passive, and active euthanasia; mercy killing, and assisted suicide. This article encourages counselors to ethically formulate client-supportive positions to help clients face life-and-death decisions.     

Professional Education and Professional Ethics Right to Die or Duty to Live?

Despite the undeniable ethical dimensions of paid occupations — trades and services — other than the traditional professions, it is still natural to associate courses of professional ethics with medicine, law, nursing or teaching, rather than auto-repair, supermarket assistance or window-cleaning. Indeed, it seems plausible to hold that if there is anything more to the traditional distinction of professions from trades or other services than considerations of social and economic status, it might well reside in the distinctive ethical or moral character and implications of such occupations as medicine, law and education. This paper undertakes to explore, via examination of some of the commonly suggested criteria of professionalism, the nature of such implications and the extent to which they justify continued deployment of a distinctive occupational category of 'profession'. On the assumption that they do, however, the paper is also concerned to examine critically the consequences for education in professional ethics of any such distinctive ethics of profession.     

Structural Determinist Aspects of Depression in Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia”

This article examines Freud's theory of depression based on his paper “Mourning and Melancholia” from the structural determinist paradigm. The reality of depression lies in the underlying structure of the mind in which Freud's libidinal drives and topographical structure of mind bring forth conflicts in relation to an object. Freud delves into the fundamental causes of depression and points out that loss of object, regression of libido into the ego, and ambivalence cause hidden conflicts, which manifest themselves as depressive symptoms and feelings. William Styron's Darkness Visible is used to illustrate its relevance to the structural determinist aspects of Freud's psychoanalytic theory of depression.     

Exposure to Parents’ Negative Emotions as a Developmental Pathway to the Family Aggregation of Depression and Anxiety in the First Year of Life

Depression and anxiety load in families. In the present study, we focus on exposure to parental negative emotions in first postnatal year as a developmental pathway to early parent-to-child transmission of depression and anxiety. We provide an overview of the little research available on the links between infants’ exposure to negative emotion and infants’ emotional development in this developmentally sensitive period, and highlight priorities for future research. To address continuity between normative and maladaptive development, we discuss exposure to parental negative emotions in infants of parents with as well as without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. We focus on infants’ emotional expressions in everyday parent–infant interactions, and on infants’ attention to negative facial expressions as early indices of emotional development. Available evidence suggests that infants’ emotional expressions echo parents’ expressions and reactions in everyday interactions. In turn, infants exposed more to negative emotions from the parent seem to attend less to negative emotions in others’ facial expressions. The links between exposure to parental negative emotion and development hold similarly in infants of parents with and without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. Given its potential links to infants’ emotional development, and to later psychological outcomes in children of parents with depression and anxiety, we conclude that early exposure to parental negative emotions is an important developmental mechanism that awaits further research. Longitudinal designs that incorporate the study of early exposure to parents’ negative emotion, socio-emotional development in infancy, and later psychological functioning while considering other genetic and biological vulnerabilities should be prioritized in future research.     

From Persecution to Depression: A Case of Chronic Depression—Associating the Rorschach,the TAT,and Winnicott

In this article, I discuss a case study of a patient with depression, paranoid ideation, and other psychiatric difficulties who presented in a state of acute crisis. I review the Swiss Lausanne model of Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) interpretation, focusing on a psychoanalytic understanding of special contents and verbalizations. I then present a review of Comprehensive System (Exner, 2003) Structural Summary variables based on a modified Rorschach administration, while qualifying the meanings of these variables in light of the modified procedure. I conclude with a review of Winnicott's (1969) ideas on the paranoid potential, tie it to the main points of the case, and offer a 5-year follow-up of the patient's treatment. The case offers an approach to personality assessment that is informed by an international theory built on psychology and philosophy, and offers support for the use of an alternative theory-based, psychoanalytic method of data analysis.     

Is There a Right to Have Rights? The Case of the Right of Asylum

In dialogue with the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib the author draws on the idea of a right to have rights and raises the question under which political conditions asylum can be a subjective right for political refugees. He argues that mere spontaneous acts of humanitarianism will not suffice to define the institutional commitments of liberal democracies in refugee policy. At the same time, no duty for any particular state to take up refugees can be derived from a right to have rights. The quest for institutional solutions for a timely migration and asylum policy will rather enhance the discourses on the self-understanding of liberal democracies. With a critical eye on German asylum legislation and legal practice, the author contends that it will be a task of any co-ordinated European right of asylum to define political persecution in relation to the first dimension of human rights in order to differentiate the right of asylum from immigration legislation.     

A Right of Rebellion in the Mengzi?

Mengzi believed that tyrannical rulers can be justifiably deposed, and many contemporary scholars see this as grounding a right of popular rebellion. I argue that the text of the Mengzi reveals a more mixed view, and does so in two respects. First, it suggests that the people are sometimes permitted to participate in a rebellion but not permitted to decide for themselves when rebellion is warranted. Second, it gives appropriate moral weight not to the people’s judgments about the justifiability of rebelling, but rather to certain affections and behaviors that closely track their life satisfaction. I contend that in both respects the permissions Mengzi grants the people fall short of a proper right of rebellion. I conclude that the more historical account of Mengzi’s “just revolt theory” suggests an intriguing division of deliberative labor, and note some of the advantages of this account.     

Dysregulated Rhythms and the “Grip” of the Context: A Discussion of the Paper “Poison Cookies” by Katherine Oram

Two moments from the clinical narrative under discussion are used to highlight the critical impact of attention to timing not in terms of when and what to say, but rather as a an ongoing source of emotional meaning emerging on implicit dimensions of rhythm and affective tone occurring in the clinical interaction. Meanings having to do with different forms of power including fear of psychic annihilation, agency, and aggression expressed within sado-masochistic dynamics are demonstrated to be scaffolded and coming into formation on these implicit levels. Alternatively, Merleu-Ponty's concept of Urdoxa as a grip on context is introduced to highlight how the analyst's use of timing to violate an expectation for nonresponsiveness or impingement creates an experience of distance between enactment and reflection, allowing space for re-membering as a form of representation. Here the creation of space through timing serves not just a representational function, but also a way for affective self and interactive regulation to emerge in an interaction as scaffolding for experiences of predictability (i.e., continuity and coherence) and vitality in self and other.     

Parental Acceptance and Children’s Psychological Adjustment in the Context of Power and Prestige

On a sample of 313 nine- through 16-year-old Spanish children this study explored the question: Is the relation between paternal versus maternal acceptance and the psychological adjustment of offspring significantly affected by the level of interpersonal power and/or prestige of each parent within the family? The relationship between perceived parental acceptance and children’s psychological adjustment depends on which parent was perceived by children to have higher interpersonal power or prestige than the other. This trend was especially strong in families when mothers were perceived to have both higher power and higher prestige than fathers. The strongest overall contribution to children’s adjustment, however, was made in families where fathers were perceived to have both the highest power and the highest prestige.