Biopower is a prominent force in mental health, with psychiatry having a strong influential grasp across the areas of definition of mental disorders, diagnosis, care, treatment, and legislation. One area that impacts upon the everyday lives of community mental health service users is treatment, largely dominated by medication. This paper will explore biopower in relation to the practices and management of mental health service users' medication regimens. Michel Foucault's insistence in his later work that power is the product of bodily forces will be drawn upon in highlighting the importance of undertaking analysis of medication regimens. Taking examples from a project focused on service user experience, the concept of 'somatic enactment' is suggested as a means through which to open up biopower to the localised concerns of service users with regard to the issue of managing one's body on a day to day basis, as affected by medication. In doing so, the author seeks to move towards a notion of biopower that does not only work on a 'top down' manner, and in which processes of embodied subjectification can be illuminated, without recourse to a straightforward power-resistance framework.
This essay concerns one of the strangest exhibits of all time: the display of Friedrich Nietzsche's live body in Villa Silberblick, a house overlooking Weimar, the "City of European Culture" in 1999. Since Weimar's self-representation is organized almost entirely around the glory of a handful of long-dead men and the public spaces devoted to them, the town might as well have declared itself "City of Museum Culture." Indeed, its culture has been strange at times, and its contradictions are not all that badly summed up in the double meaning of Silberblick, which can mean both silver view and cross-eyed vision. In the story of Nietzsche's final years we will encounter both the silvering and the squinting.
In this study Kuwaiti undergraduate students (N= 215) completed the 60 individual items of the Somatic Symptoms Inventory (Abdel-Khalek, 2003) and 3 scales of depression – the Symptom Checklist-90, Depression Subscale (SCL-90; D: Derogatis, 1994) the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (CESD: Radloff, 1977) and the Hopkins Symptoms Check List-Depression Scale (HCS-D: Derogatis, Lipman, Rickels, Uhlenhuth, & Covi, 1974) to determine the correlation between the 60 individual items of the SSI and the 3 scales of depression. It was concluded that the following somatic symptoms can predict depression in a nonclinical sample: tension, heart pains, sleep disorder, anorexia, weight gain, migraine, and sexual disorders, respectively.
Before relating somatic growth and maturation to genital maturation, we should present a concept of growth that is sometimes a little difficult to conceive. The most important basis in studying human growth is the fact that it is a continuum, and does not start at birth, but at conception. This continuum rarely moves at a constant speed. We are so used to thinking in terms of size attained: the average measure of head circumference at 3 months of age in health, for example. Yet to consider growth as movement leads us to think in terms of velocity; that is, how fast, or slowly, is an individual child growing.
The United States of America has been in a state of continual war in Afghanistan and across the Middle East for 18 years. Three sitting presidents, two of which inherited the war from their predecessor, have authorized to either extend or increase military spending and troop levels, slowly bleeding the retrograde process of exiting Afghanistan over the past decade, with no foreseeable resolution in sight. Returning service-members, who themselves make up but a fraction of the ½% of the U.S. population serving in the military are met by a largely uninformed and unmoved public unaware of the difficulties of reintegrating weaponized bodies and brains back into their communities. I believe this is due to the following two factors: first, the implementation and professionalization of a post-Vietnam War, all-volunteer military, and second, the valorization/idealization of service-members and veterans within popular society. In addition to these cultural trends, the Department of Defense (DoD) has continued to develop weapons systems technology far beyond the rifles and bayonets of preceding wars- instead, human actors are increasingly plugged into rhizomatic networks of algorithms and data for application overseas. Not only does this keep service members twice removed from the battlefield, but it also seats them within an ecosystem of data exchange, information, and execution increasing mediated through screens and digital readouts, and away from the real world effects of U.S. interventionism overseas. It is not a question of whether this industrial complex of body, tech, and ideology exists, but to what extent, and to what end. History has proven that a standing defense force is necessary at every level and formulation of social organization- that much is not in question. What remains to be seen is whether the United States can field such a force with the informed, deliberate consent of its public. I've delineated the evolution of my research and practice into three distinct phases, each of which builds on the knowledge and experience of the previous concepts. The first, Weaponization details the conditioning process through which behavior modification, motor learning, and psychology are used to desensitize service members to the commitment of institutional violence on behalf of the U.S. government, a process I experienced first-hand. The second, Response, plots the re-emergence from the rhizomatic power structures of the military and State through reintegration/reclamation/repurposing of the body/mind dynamic using the principles of somatic awareness, improvisational body movement (dance), and performance. The third, Social Engagement, outlines the full circle of integration back into society as teacher, facilitator, and mediator through the arts.
