(Dis)Arming the madman: sane supremacy and the Second Amendment

Abstract

The protection of American mental health consumers’ Second Amendment rights is the ‘mad’ liberation issue of the twenty-first century. Federal laws currently dispossess the differently minded of their Second Amendment access and rights to bear firearms. In response to a spate of school shootings, ‘Red flag laws’ are used in an effort to circumvent mad citizens’ rights to self-preservation and defence. In this article I am proposing neither a political-left nor right side of the aisle position, but rather a bipartisan, anti-sanist stance, where I call for an end to America’s contemporary era of sane supremacy that strips the mad citizenry of their rights to own firearms.     

Trump Today

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again” by way of a new isolationism of the US. In the first 100 days of his presidency, he has restricted immigration, pursued aggressively the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and drastically reduced the US State Department. Judged in terms of transnational American Studies, his policies have employed a new nationalism to disguise a one-way global agenda. Trump’s withdrawal from the Transpacific Partnership has reconfigured economic relations across the Pacific and in East Asia. His approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline project has enriched a Canadian corporation. Even his appointment of Elizabeth Devos as Secretary of Education has obscured his close relations with her brother, Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater Security, an international corporation that supplies mercenaries to governments around the world. Transnational American Studies has an ethical obligation to continue its work of understanding US politics, economics, and culture in terms of its global consequences.     

Ableism and the Trump phenomenon

This article argues that Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential campaign was abetted by ableism, both directly, through Trump’s rhetoric, and indirectly, through the ableist culture and infrastructure of the rural, white working-class communities that turned the election for Trump. The article uses Robert McRuer’s account of ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ to situate Trump’s popularity in relation to the neoliberal policies that have marginalized and stigmatized the white working class, and deploys Lennard Davis’s account of normalcy to explain why Trump’s own bodily difference was widely, and hypocritically, mocked by the left, and also why Trump’s ‘non-normative’ embodiment appealed to his white working-class supporters.     

Explicating the public memory dialectic in public relations: The case of Donald Trump,The Oath Keepers,and January 6, 2021

The public relations practice participates in making, shaping, telling, and interpreting societal memory to influence issue positions and related actions. That claim implies several themes. One, societal memory is a useful concept for understanding the strategic processes of meaning and meaning making, narratives which constitute society. Two, the content of their prevailing memories shapes the choices individuals make separately and collectively. Public relations’ centrality to societal memory remains an underappreciated and underexplored research area. Scholars have explored the role public relations plays in societal memory by examining, for instance, the textuality of art as well as memorials and statues, their erection and erasure. To better understand this process, scholarship needs to examine strategic public relations efforts to “blur” societal memory as a means of creating alternative versions (revisionist history) of lived truth, values, norms, and policies. After examining memory, including blurring, we use the January 6, 2021 United States presidential election (Congressional Certification) Capitol “protest event” to demonstrate how blurring occurs and its potential adverse implications. We suggest and conceptualize in a model that societal memory occurs as a dialectic; some etched version of history (i.e., thesis) comes under question (i.e., antithesis), and through either a process of blurring, erasure, or retention, that etched history is then muddied, expunged, or lives on (i.e., synthesis). Meaning matters in the enactment and critical assessment of public relations’ role in societal agency.     

Trump and the legacy of a menacing past

The inability to learn from the past takes on a new meaning as a growing number of authoritarian regimes emerge across the globe. This essay argues that central to understanding the rise of a fascist politics in the United States is the necessity to address the power of language and the intersection of the social media and the public spectacle as central elements in the rise of a formative culture that produces the ideologies and agents necessary for an American-style fascism. In this project, education is central to politics, which demands understanding and critically interrogating, in particular, the role of the conservative media in suppressing history, normalizing a discourse of racial hatred, and advancing the most poisonous elements of neoliberalism. The essay calls for a comprehensive notion of politics and education that draws from history, imagines a present that does not imitate the future, and employs a language of critique and hope in the service of building a new broad-based political formation. If fascism begins with language so does the possibility of a radical social imaginary in which to envision a democratic socialist order that both challenges the menacing momentum of a fascist politics and the savagery of neoliberal capitalism.     

Teaching Trump: A Case Study of Two Teachers and the Election of 2016

This case study investigated how two 8th-grade teachers planned for, delivered, and reflected on their teaching of the 2016 Presidential Election. Data sources included classroom observations, teacher interviews, and lesson plans. Despite integrating student-centered lessons about the election with social and political events in US History from1792-1861, one teacher, Ms. Smith, struggled to navigate burgeoning issues that galvanized students. During the six-week unit, both teachers maintained neutral positions on the candidates; however, after the election, Ms. Smith allowed her disdain for Donald Trump to seep into her teaching. Because exigent political events, such as presidential elections, hold great potential to accelerate students' political socialization, more needs to be learned about how teachers do and should manage the teaching of controversial issues in the social classroom.     

Where to from here? Blue passports,family, career—and Donald Trump

Abstract

In this essay, we offer our stories of family and migration under a Donald Trump presidency. We are a lesbian couple; one of us is a citizen of the United States while the other is a citizen of a Muslim country. We use autoethnographic methods to explore and interrogate our “messy and fabulous” journey of liminality; our journey of belonging and exclusion, where we grapple with issues related to sexuality, family, career, and citizenship. Our “voices” are used both individually and in unison, to highlight our intersectional and relational selves. We intend this work to contribute to the many ways we can better understand and appreciate the bountiful and colorful vistas of lesbian families’ migrant experiences.     

Norbert Elias, maritime supremacy and the naval profession: on Elias' unpublished studies in the genesis of the naval profession

In 1950 Norbert Elias published the first of three studies on 'The Genesis of the Naval Profession' in the British Journal of Sociology. At the time Elias was not the established scholar that he was to become in later days. In the 1950s his work on the 'Naval Profession' was not well received by the audience, even though all the major themes of the 'civilizing process' were interwoven in the article. The other two studies were never published in English journals (only one was published in a Dutch journal but received no international attention). A perusal of the Norbert Elias Archive in Marbach am Neckar in Germany--shows that the 'Naval Profession' project is larger than the intended three part series of articles for the BJS. From an outline to the project found in the archive it can be concluded that Elias intended to write a book with six to seven chapters. The key to the studies is a sketchy theory of institutions, which states that conflict promotes institutional development. Through the conflict between two occupational groups, sailors and soldiers, the naval officer becomes institutionalized as a new profession. During the period this process takes place England acquires maritime supremacy, secures the passages to the colonies and becomes an empire.     

In the Streets of San Francisco

The presidency of Donald Trump has occasioned critical repercussions within the field of American Studies around the world. This piece is a response from Germany: a country marked by the historical experiences of fascism and a socialist surveillance state, but a country that, in spite of the liberal pluralistic consensus that grew out of these historical traumata, now has to face a similar development as other Western countries: the rise of new forms of nationalist parochialism, racism coupled with white patriarchal nostalgia and a militant anti-humanism. The rise of a new right, the piece argues, must be regarded as the manifestation of deep insecurities about individual and collective identities which are increasingly defined not on the basis of achievement but on the basis of inheritance. Remembering an instance of ‘hospitality toward a stranger’ in 1979 California, the essay evokes the spirit of cosmopolitanism which, though currently under fierce attack, continues to thrive in the United States, thanks to the commitment of local civil actors, and which needs to be defended by comparatively minded American Studies scholars.     

Liminal Stigma and Disaligning Activity: Online Comments about Trump's Family Separation Policy

In 2018, the Trump administration initiated a “zero-tolerance” border policy wherein they criminally prosecuted all individuals who were apprehended crossing the border without proper authorization. The policy change resulted in numerous migrant children being separated from their parents. Through a qualitative content analysis of 1500 YouTube comments made in response to CNN and ProPublica news coverage, we examine each side's aligning activity. Separation challengers claimed border crossers were innocent while condemning their opponents as racist, cruel, and otherwise shameful. Separation advocates bolstered their own claims of innocence by denying that the detainees are victims and condemning separation challengers as hypocrites, dishonest, complicit in illegal immigration, and generally loathsome. These findings show that, enabled by social media, aligning activity in stigma contests can produce a liminal stigma, where identities suffer the ideational aspects of stigma but not necessarily the loss of social status.     

Public Documents and Legislation: The South Australian Juvenile Courts Act, 1971, and Community Welfare Act, 1972

Abstract

This study of social work practice and disability follows the history of two fields of disability: mental illness and intellectual disability. Of particular interest are two key policy influences in the disability sector, deinstitutionalisation and normalisation. The extent to which deinstitutionalisation and normalisation have brought real benefit to people with disabilities is examined from social workers' perspectives. The implementation of these policies and practices on the daily work of social workers is discussed. This research indicates that social work practice in these two fields involves significantly different foci and approach. The study found that the similarities and differences between the two fields of practice are influenced by the historical and contemporary developments in the care and control of people with disabilities.     

Characteristics of urban male homeless veterans and non-veterans in Omaha,Nebraska

The current study examined differences between urban homeless veterans and non-veterans on sociodemographics, housing, clinical characteristics, and psychosocial factors. We recruited a sample of 196 homeless men (101 veterans, 95 non-veterans) from the Omaha, Nebraska metropolitan area. Structured interviews were conducted by research staff. The results showed that the two groups were similar in most respects, though there were several notable differences. Homeless veterans were found to be older and more educated than non-veterans, more likely to have married, and reported having fewer non-adult children. Multivariable models controlling for age further showed that veterans reported a higher number of medical problems and were more likely to report being diagnosed with major depression or PTSD than non-veterans. Comparison with previous studies suggests changes in certain characteristics of homeless veterans over the past few decades that may reflect the growing proportion of veterans from the all-volunteer force, initiated after the draft ended in 1975. Findings from this study were consistent with previous comparative studies suggesting limited changes in recent decades in the characteristics of homeless veterans as compared to non-veterans, although the high prevalence of major depression and PTSD merit special treatment for these disorders.     

Recovery,Managed Care,and the Reflective Practitioner

ABSTRACT

Conflicting priorities between the recovery movement among consumers of mental health services and managed behavioral health care planners result in turbulence and ambiguity in the service delivery system. Based upon information from both published and unpublished written sources, areas of strain are described. The utility of a reflective practice model, as conceptualized by Schon (1983), for addressing a recovery vision within a managed care environment is explored.     

Schizophrenia,Community Integration,and Recovery

Abstract

Rooted in deinstitutionalization policy, the community inclusion required by the Olmstead case, and the grass roots recovery movement, community integration for those who have diagnoses of serious mental illnesses has become an increasingly important policy goal. The purpose of this project was to examine empirical evidence describing experiences with social or community integration for people with psychiatric disabilities, with a particular interest in the schizophrenias. Studies chosen for review all involved direct survey or interview data from people with psychiatric disabilities and examined subjective experiences with social relationships or linked social participation with clinical, functional, or quality of life outcomes. Experiences involving the dynamics of social stigma, the achievement of personal agency, and innovative pathways to satisfying social inclusion are core themes found that are highly relevant for practitioners. Social work, with its ecological perspective, is well suited to address the complexities of conflicting interests and objectives that have arisen in mental health care in the pursuit of community integration. Suggestions for fruitful responses are presented.     

Heterosexism,racism, and mental illness discrimination: Experiences of people with mental health conditions and their families

Experiencing discrimination related to race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or having a mental health condition is associated with negative outcomes. Research comparing types of discrimination or considering intersectionalities is lacking. This study reports findings from interviews with people with mental illnesses (PWMI) or family members of PWMI; all study participants also are of color and/or lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Findings include the following: participants experienced multiple forms of discrimination, mental illness discrimination shares characteristics with racism and heterosexism, and heterosexuals and people of color reported more mental illness discrimination than their counterparts. Implications for change advocates, mental health providers, and researchers are offered.     

Characteristics of the homeless mentally ill in case management: Differentiation using major diagnostic categories

The homeless mentally ill are more disabled than other homeless people and require more services, but important variations exist. This study examined relationships between broad Axis I diagnostic clusters and demographic and service variables for 328 clients receiving case management at a community program for the chronic mentally ill homeless. Demographic characteristics, medical history, educational, psychological, and marital history, and case management variables were examined for psychotic, affective, and miscellaneous other clients. Differences were found in such areas as suicide attempts and current suicide status, psychiatric treatment history, education, overall impairment of functioning, length of time homeless, and time in case management but not in status at termination or number of services required. Psychotics had lower adaptive functioning, spent less time in case management, but had as successful outcomes as affective clients. Psychiatric diagnosis provides information that might assist case management for the homeless mentally ill.     

Bipolar disorder and the college student: A review and implications for universities

Abstract

Objective: This brief report provides a review of the prevalence and expression of bipolar disorder in the college student population. Implications for college teachers and universities working with students with bipolar disorder are presented. Methods: Responses from the National College Health Assessment (2009–2017) reference groups were collated to estimate whether the prevalence of students with bipolar disorder has been increasing over time. Results: Data indicate that although overall prevalence is low, the presence of students with bipolar disorder has increased over the past decade. Conclusions: To help students with serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder, succeed in higher education, practices consistent with the philosophy of supported education should be adopted. Special attention will need to be paid to students’ financial and academic challenges.     

Family support in late life: A review of the literature on aging,disability, and family caregiving

ABSTRACT

For older adults and people with disabilities in the United States, family caregiving is an important part of remaining at home and in the community. As care recipients and caregivers age, family dynamics change, and the health, social, and financial impacts of this (largely unremunerated) work have implications for individuals, families, and social policy. In this review, the authors map the literature across multiple fields related to disability and aging to understand caregiving in late life, what it means to be an older caregiver and/or to care for older people. The authors summarize the findings of 97 articles to address the care, services, and supports family caregivers provide for older adults; negative and positive impacts for caregivers serving in this role; supports that family members use or need; and societal impact of family caregiving. Much of the literature describes the work family caregivers provide and negative impacts of caregiving. Less attention is devoted to caregiving benefits, supports used by family caregivers, and societal impacts. The authors conclude with an agenda for future research that attends to the need for research that includes: more diverse samples, new types of caregivers, longitudinal data, qualitative data and analysis, and comparative research.     

Current and Prior Mental Health Treatment of Jail Inmates: The Use of the Jail as an Alternative Shelter

Changing policies in mental health and welfare are altering the character of urban jail populations. Homeless people, many of them ex–mental-hospital patients, occupy jail space in increasing numbers. They almost never commit violent crimes and seldom commit any real crime. They are given a charge and put in jail as a way to take them off the streets. The way in which official statistics are created and kept makes it difficult to demonstrate the nature and extent of this problem. This paper reports on one way this can be done.