Heterodoxy in Economics and Healthcare
I may as well face it: I am tarred with the same brush that paints psychiatry, hospital and community mental health services these days (and nights). Sometimes the media, with due cause I sadly add, dispenses with the brush: the paint comes by the bucket full and is hurled.
As a product of the Victorian asylum system I am bound to be tainted. This seems to be the case when seeking feedback on Hodges' model from activists for anti-psychiatry, patient activism, engagement, self-care, carers rights and recovery. There are those who feel even the latter is a political foil that stabs at the heart and mind of those in desperate need of mental health care. The situation is exacerbated even further, such is the politicisation of healthcare and mental health in-particular since austerity cast its shadow on funding.
In seeking comment on Hodges' model this is very much about pros and cons. Hodges' model being from the 1980's is an historical artifact, but I beg to differ as to its relevance. To that audience Hodges' model is probably the antithesis of "Love at First Sight". Like the psychiatric system and the legal powers it can exercise, the model says;
If that is the reaction then the possibilities: creative, innovative, reflective, person centred... of then blurring and erasing these lines, divisions and gathering the whole person and their situation is lost.
So, if the new wave thinking in mental health provision eschews the paraphernalia of models and framework then what is the alternative?
The question is important, vital even when we look at the mental health nursing curriculum. Curricula are never fixed in the sense that the new emerges from the old. How radical is this change?
The above reflections are prompted by an excellent piece in the FT Weekend (1-2 October) by David Pilling on the teaching of economics. I recalled a few years ago the rumpus on campus reported across the media.
Individuals and families do seek explanations, both of what ails them, their treatment and the plan of care whether enacted as self-care - a care partnership - or emergency care in the first (and vital) instance. Pilling writes about the how economics is taught, the call for broader curricula (which is underway) and the role for heterodoxy.
So I've a few questions: Where is the heterodoxy in healthcare (beyond alternative medicine/homeopathy)? Is there really no need of a generic conceptual framework in healthcare?
If the new Econocracy needs a framework then students across disciplines may also find some value in Hodges' model...
Given the cross-disciplinary pressures on healthcare systems the world-over there really is a need rethink healthcare as well as economics. Arguing in response about the economic benefits of technology is indicated and well-justified, but it is not e-nough.
| "The students gathered in response to an email ... Philosophy Ethics Individual Psychology (Robinson Crusoe) | (email...) It asked whether the economics they were learning, dominated by mathematical formula and abstract models, was relevant to the real world." "How far can economics be called a real science?" "Earle complains that the repeated use of such formulaic models presents a "closed system", immune to external interrogation. "You are taught a narrow way of thinking about the economy as this set of rules and laws not to be questioned and not to be engaged with," he says. ..." |
| (Robinson Crusoe & Friday) Group Psychology Behavioural Economics | He would like, he says, to "put politics, and philosophy and, well, ethics back into economics by teaching it as a "contested", cross-disciplinary subject..." "Post-Crash Economics has folded into Rethinking Economics" Post-Crash Economics Society |
My source:
Pilling D. (2016). Crash and learn, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, 1-2 October, p.1-2.
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965