Hannah Pickard - Responsibility Without Blame in Therapeutic Communities
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Hanna Pickard is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. She is also appointed with the William H. Miller Department of Philosophy, the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Her expertise is deep and spread across a wide variety of disciplines. As an analytic philosopher, she specializes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, and clinical ethics. She also worked for a decade at The Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, a specialist service in the NHS for people diagnosed with personality disorders and complex needs. Her work tends to address the sticky debates that arise in clinical practice.
She has over 35 academic publications and has co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction. Pickard maintains an important thread between clinical work in the real world and her philosophical writings, attending to topics like the nature of mental disorders, delusions, agency, character, emotions, self-harm, violence, placebos, therapeutic relationships, decision-making capacity, the self and social identity, and attitudes towards mental disorder and crime.
In this interview, she discusses her novel and possibly controversial model for understanding addiction, the numerous shortcomings of the neurobiological model, the importance of centering patient agency, and her work in therapeutic communities.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:13.6 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mad in America podcast. |
| 0:18.1 | I am your host for today, Ayyrdedhar, an assistant professor of psychology |
| 0:22.8 | at Mount Mary University and a science news writer at Mad in America. Our guest for today is Dr. Hannah |
| 0:29.8 | Picard, who is a Bloomberg distinguished professor of philosophy and bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. |
| 0:37.1 | She's also appointed with the William H. Miller |
| 0:39.6 | Department of Philosophy and the Berman Institute of Bioethics and with the Department of Psychological |
| 0:45.7 | and Brain Sciences. So it's clear that her expertise is not just deep, but also spread wide |
| 0:52.7 | across disciplines and fields. She has far too many |
| 0:56.1 | publications to count. I counted like 30 and then I stopped, so I lost track, but there are many |
| 1:01.7 | book chapters and journal articles and a book that you have co-edited, the Rutledge Handbook. |
| 1:07.6 | But what I find special about her is that she maintains that really important thread |
| 1:13.3 | between clinical work in the real world and her philosophical writings, while many others |
| 1:18.7 | often get lost in one another. So today we will discuss her really interesting model on |
| 1:24.7 | addiction and personality disorders, the importance of agency for |
| 1:29.0 | patients and her work in therapeutic communities. Welcome to Mad and America, Dr. Picard. |
| 1:35.0 | Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. All right, so let's dive in. |
| 1:40.3 | You have written about the responsibility without blame model for addiction. |
| 1:45.9 | Could you tell us what this model is and also what it is not? |
| 1:50.3 | Sure. So in ways, let me start not with the model, but with my own experience, which is the basis for the model, |
| 1:58.1 | which is the clinical work I did in a therapeutic community in England for about |
| 2:03.7 | 10 years. And I came to that work in a funny way. I had very little clinical experience. I was a |
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