Special Hearings — Mental Health Workshop — 1997-11-20

CHAIRPERSON: I think everyone's probably ready for a break to tea and absorb what's been said but I think - like I said, tomorrow we'll be able to discuss and go into them and formulate the recommendations.
 But thank you very much, I'm sure the next presentation will speak to a lot of the issue mentioned as well and I think you'll have a lot to say about medication and over medicating and the kind of problems you are talking about.
 Could I say that we're down to break for a quarter of an hour, could I ask us to come back at twenty to - which is actually a 20 minute break, it's next door so we'll be close if we suddenly have to re-group, thank you very much.
COMMITTEE ADJOURNS
ON RESUMPTION

CHAIRPERSON: Okay, welcome back - I keep speaking too close to the microphone.  Welcome Professor Mohammed Seedat and Professor Lionel Nicholas, I'm sure you'll be keeping your presentations to the stipulated half an hour and if you could respect that for the time of the day and when you're ready, please go ahead.

PROF SEEDAT: Thank you, I'm planning just to speak for 5 minutes anyway.  I guess I'm going to deviate somewhat from the written submission, given that many of the points I wanted to highlight have been focused on by the various speakers this morning.
 So I'm just going to be very brief and talk about psychology as a discipline from the perspective of knowledge production, what questions psychologists have historically research and which questions or which areas they have neglected to research and what are the possible reasons for the omission or the silences.
 Psychology's unwitting and perhaps witting complicity in the rationalisation of segregationist ideology, including apartheid and patriarchy has been examined from various vantage points.  Individual psychologists have been criticised for their political dubious roles in the first Carnegie Commission Study on Poor Whites in South Africa and for their selective psychological testing activities in the military and in industry.
 Psychologists in these areas historically ignored the exploitative activities that sanitised war, that justified war and rationalised or ignored the gross dehumanisation of Black workers in industries such as the mining industry.  Similarly, various writers, including Lionel Nicholas, Saths Cooper, Kiribone Letlaka, Renee and Don Foster, have highlighted organised psychology's failure to denounce apartheid as a system that compromised the mental well-being of all South Africans, both Black and White.  
 It is therefore not surprising that psychologists have also ignored the fact that historically associations such as the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa - PIRSA, was explicitly formed because there was unhappiness or disgruntlement of the inclusion of Black psychologists in professional associations - I'm sure many people will talk about these particular areas over the next few days.   As I said in my opening, I just want to focus on the process knowledge production, who produces the knowledge within the discipline, for whom is it produced and for what purpose is it produced and this is not merely an academic exercise or academic question, it's not a question out of intellectual curiosity.  
 I first became interested in this question of knowledge when I was a student back in 1985 at a historically White University, one of two Black students in the class - each day I left the programme wondering or feeling schizophrenic, feeling disjointed - I wondered whether I needed to check myself into one of the psychiatric institutions because the language that was being used did not speak - to my experience, to my psychological experience, nor did it speak to the experience of other Black students that I dialogued with.  
 Each day we entered into a class in which there was unbridled competitiveness in which students refused to share notes with each other, in which there was extreme competitiveness to get the distinction and I wondered whether these people would make good psychologists and have interest in human welfare.  
 I wondered how the selection process unfolded, what were the criteria in selecting people in what's considered a very highly esteemed programme.  If you get into a Master's Programme at any university in psychology in South Africa, you can consider yourself as being part of an elitist intellectual group and that situation still continues.
 I wondered how was it that sitting in this class of nine people where there was a lack of appreciation for each other for the backgrounds that we came from, how that related to my bus ride home everyday in which people had no hesitation in sharing the potato chips that they would take or the sweets that they would have at the end of the day.  
 And I wondered really: "What is it that we're learning, are we learning to serve the society or are we been turned into careerist psychologists who are going to publish articles or go into private practice and merely buttress our own careers and our own position", and it was at that point I decided that I should look at all of the major psychology journals - and those who were interested in reading more about it could read the written submission.  
 I don't want to get into the methodology and the particular theoretical framework but aside just to say, no matter which angle you look at it, whether you look at the affiliation of the authors who produce the articles in these seven journals, whether you look at the gender, the race or the subjects that were studied and included in experimental, were empirical investigations, they were always almost White males.
 If you look at what was being studied, it was always something - the subject are, it was of very little relevance to the majority of this country's population.  Subjects such as violence, malnutrition, homelessness, political detention or the overall impact of oppression at the structural interpersonal level, was never ever examined.  
 It began in the latter years - in the later parts of the '80's, to receive some attention by progressive writers and it was really represented a negligible activity on negligible endeavour.  When subjects such as violence has been examined and  continues to be examined, it is construed as a Black problem by it's Black killing Blacks and therefore it's not really a serious issue to look at and yet violence and injuries arising out of unintentional causes, is the second major cause of death in this country after communicable diseases.
 The recent rush to understand and study violence leaves one wondering why is this sudden rush.  One questions whether it's to do with the availability of funds or whether it's to do with the fact that violence is no longer restricted to the townships and that it's now spilled over to the elite suburbs of the country.
 Basically, if one looks at it further on - at the level of representation, it's not possible to produce the knowledge if people don't - if the producers of knowledge are not representative of our diversity, whether it's at the cultural, racial, sexual orientation level, gender lever, it's not possible.  
 And if we're talking about producing or transforming our mental health service delivery systems, if we want to look at how to make those systems accessible, available and relevant, then we do need to look at how we produce the knowledge.  We've got to look at who produces this knowledge ...[End of tape 4B - no follow-on sound]