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In this conversation Sophia Efstathiou and Rebeca Ibáñez Martín discuss how a love for the animal you are going to eat, or gustar, offers an alternative to industrial animal husbandry. They discuss how changing relationships between humans and animals in intensive farming mediated by technologies of effacement break these attachments, ironically allowing for the animal to be replaced. Looking to ethnographic work and situated analyses of working with animals opens up possibilities for different ways of being with animals. Meat is performatively constituted, and it can be constituted differently and less violently.
This commentary is a reflection on cultured meat and, more generally, food innovation, articulated from the perspective of political ecology (for a proposal around the ‘political ecology of food’ see ). This approach allows to critically investigate the status and role of novel foods in the context of the ecologic crisis, highlighting the complex entanglements of power, labour and value that subtend processes of food innovation and shape imaginaries of future food systems, as well as pathways of sustainability. As such, political ecology also calls for a reflection on food politics at large, envisioning transformative practices that question current arrangements of gender, class, race, species. In its unwillingness to ‘solve’ or close down the vast problem of food innovation, political ecology highlights ambiguities, risks, but also opportunities, as tools to guide a radical political imagination around food in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. This stands in contrast with the polarising and partial way in which cultured meat tends to be represented in present public debates. The Italian ‘ban’ on cultured meat that is likely to be introduced is particularly interesting and it will serve as a starting point for this commentary.
This article draws on the lived experience of the author to discuss the Black mixed-raced experience of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), particularly in relation to the BPD symptom of troubled identities. This article argues that what psychiatry pathologises as a troubled identity within BPD is actually an everyday experience for a mixed-race person growing up between cultures. This article goes on to discuss Black mixed-race people’s identity through a lens of performativity, how this presents and is weaponised in psychiatry, and why it is important for psychiatry to understand Black mixed-race identities.
Many people have been labelled with psychiatric ‘diagnoses’ such as ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’. That was one of the labels that was bestowed on me, amongst others, incorrectly. This poem speaks to what I experienced.
The healthcare experience of many people carrying the label ‘borderline personality disorder (BPD)’ is one of exclusion, discrimination and neglect. The letters ‘BPD’ replace our very humanity, trampling our right to receive evidence-based, appropriate, lawful and compassionate care. Within mental health services our pain, distress, unusual experiences and self-harm/suicidal actions have been reconceptualised as ‘behavioural’ issues, encouraging the promotion of punitive and cruel responses from professionals in an attempt to discourage us from seeking help. ‘Responsibilisation’ narratives, which prioritise personal independence over all else, legitimise institutional neglect. We are told suicide is a choice we have the capacity to make, while care is actively withheld to avoid us becoming dependent on support. Despite the rising suicide rates of people labelled with a personality disorder diagnosis in the UK, our risk continues to be downplayed; rewritten as a risk of death by ‘misadventure’; and accepted by services and coroners as a justifiable outcome of so-called ‘less is more’ care plans. This article explores the current mental health service landscape in which prejudice and stigma direct ‘BPD’ care through the creation and maintenance of clinical mythology, which despite its popularity across healthcare teams, is not supported by ongoing research findings and recommendations.
A personal reflection on the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.
A personal account of the inability to discard the borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis decades after it has been applied. The impact of a BPD diagnosis continues long after discharge from treatment services. The author seeks a route map out of BPD labelling but there is no process to follow.
