Accessible Summary
People with intellectual disability are often described as “vulnerable” or a “vulnerable group.”
The paper focuses on vulnerability as part of an ethical discussion in research.
The paper says that people with intellectual disability are not necessarily more vulnerable than others in all areas of life but, like everyone else, experience many social contexts that may or may not place them in vulnerable positions.
The paper is concerned with how the negative attributes often related to the label intellectual disability and vulnerability affect the decisions and views of researchers.
Abstract
BackgroundPeople with intellectual disability are often defined as a vulnerable group. The feminist philosopher Jackie Scully argues that vulnerability is often associated with qualities such as immaturity, helplessness, victimhood, passivity and so forth. As research is a social activity, the qualities associated with vulnerability affect researchers’ decisions about who to include and exclude from their research project as well as influencing their interpretations of the research participants’ answers, behaviour and actions. This may result in excluding people with intellectual disability from research or that their ways of being becomes interpreted as mere symptoms of their diagnosis rather than subjective opinions and experiences.
ConclusionBy addressing these issues through the work of Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim, this paper contests traditional interpretations of vulnerability and instead argues that vulnerability should be related more specifically to each individual research project and prompt questions such as: How do we protect these particular participants from harm?
Coercion in psychiatric care may cause long-term negative effects such as trauma, reluctance to seek later treatment, as well as erosion of self-confidence and trust in one’s own feelings and thoughts. Based on data from a previous study and the theoretical framework developed by Hans Skjervheim, this article discusses how experiences with coercion may appear as a result of how the patients are approached and defined when involuntarily admitted. If patients admitted to involuntary psychiatric care are treated as objects they might respond by objectifying the professionals back or succumbing to the descriptions of themselves as sick. The latter may ultimately cause them to question their own sanity. In light of this, this paper argues that there is a need for an ongoing ethical discussion on how to find common ground between patients and health care workers, where both are viewed as subjects with knowledge and opinions worthy of respect.
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