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

UNKNOWN: That is a hype question to answer.  Perhaps my colleagues can help me there.  What has changed is that the content matter of psychology has shifted.  In some places it may not have shifted as substantially, but it has shifted.
 What is also changing, the question was asked earlier about how does one encourage and develop new leadership, new researches, new intellectuals?  Part of that has to do with for example one of the journals in psychology there are essentially two journals in this country.  The one is the South African Journal of Psychology which was, well if people talked about irrelevant, that was it.
 It was irrelevant.  It had publications that talked about stuff that nobody could really understand or even considered.  It was like you could be on a different planet.
 Psychology in Society came out as an alternative to that and some very useful work has been published in that particular journal.
 The journals have shifted since then.  One of the policies that has emerged at least in terms of Psychology in Society, is that people talked about the difficulty of writing, and there is always the difficulty of writing for lots of different reasons.
 But when people now write and submit articles or whatever, whatever it is that they submit to for example Psychology in Society, the Editor then works with that person to get the article published.  It is no longer we send it out to your reviewers and we will do a scrutiny of it and reject or accept it. 
 Another sort of development has been  under the sort of leadership of Norman Duncan, the special issue on by the South African Journal of Psychology, around black authorship, trying to encourage black authors to ... (tape ends) ... but it is more than just the question of representivity, because if you look only at that level, it is easy to have old wine in new bottles.  You just produce a black face, or put a woman who is reproducing the old concepts and the old ideas without creating a genuine shift in what we should be looking at, does it represent the world view of this country's population?
 Does it look at for instance the majority of the people, of this country's people are not violent.  They have not engaged in violent behaviour, how is it that the majority have succeeded in being resilient and in maintaining the humanity despite the cross levels of dehumanisation that has perpetuated through the exploitative system?
 When psychologists investigate and research, they always look for deficits, they are always looking for pathology because they are ready to attach a label.  I think if we can recommend that the intellectuals, social scientists in particular begin to relook at how to investigate the phenomena that are of paramount importance for service delivery and for the teaching programmes that students go through each year, that we should be looking at without dramatising exploitation and oppression, we should be looking at the resiliency of this country's people and how that can be harnessed to promote positive mental health for all South Africans, given that we are never going to be able to in the short or mid-term, produce the kind of mental health workers we require at the level of service delivery.
 We have to get creative and really look at the organic systems of healing that underserved and unserved communities have forged in promoting their own well-being.
 In conclusion to my very brief presentation, for many people what I said may be old hat, but it bears repetition, because for most psychologists they have not acknowledged the omission at the level of knowledge production.  They have not acknowledged the biases, the distorted images of blacks and women that occur in psychological literature.
 Psychologists, organised psychology is yet to acknowledge this complicity and the exclusion that they  systematically, perpetuated by virtue of silence.  At the same time, right now there is a thrust of those of us who work partly or fully within academic institutions will know, that the publish or perish phenomena has arrived in South Africa and so there is a major thrust to publish irrespective of what you publish, the social relevance is ignored.
 Whether it is linked to transformation, the promotion of democracy is ignored, and when such questions do come up, one is very squarely and clearly told that that has nothing to do with psychology or with academia, that academia is neutral.  And yet, historically if you look at it, it has never been neutral.
 So I am hoping that in the discussions that unfold, this kind of area be taken up, we not be able to legislate against people pursuing certain kinds of research but we can certainly create mechanisms that discourage omission.  Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.  Thank you for being brief.  Given that you have been brief, would the panel like to respond?
 I would like to respond first of all before I give my colleagues a chance.  Do you have any suggestions as to a kind of new system of production of knowledge?  I need to put some thought towards that?

UNKNOWN: It is easier to critic than to formulate constructive recommendations, and I recognise that.  It is a very difficult area to cope with and to deal with, but I think at a very basic level, institutions that produce knowledge, need to be encouraged and they need to be very strong reinforcers to ensure that at a primary level there is representativity.
 That the systems producing knowledge represent various interest groups and the diversity that this country contains.  It is absolutely important.
 Secondly to really look at creating those think tanks that receive institutional and political support and these think tanks really need to look at, or be encouraged to examine from another perspective and to (indistinct) theoretical analysis from creative perspectives.
 I think you know, that is perhaps a life long endeavour, but really to take the chances and to be encouraged that production of knowledge is not related just to publications.  Most academics find that their jobs and their job security is related to the number of publications that they churn out and that needs to be discouraged if we really want to create incentives for people to take risks, and to be asking questions that they hadn't asked before.
 I think there is a lot of creative ideas, people have at an intellectual level, they have the (indistinct) of ideas and projects that they would like to embark on, but it is the mechanisms that enable that, that needs to be set in place.
 It isn't so much that there isn't a willingness.  I think you can easily put together in each province, a major think tank that look at production of knowledge for a comprehensive mental health system.
 It is really looking at what will enable that.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Panel?  Dr Wendy Orr?

WENDY ORR: I think you probably answered part of my question in your reply to the previous question, but I was going to ask if there is any discussion within an academic circles and between universities and tertiary educational institutions about the kind of issues that you are raising, and if not, is there anything that the Truth Commission or the profession can do to try and facilitate and kickstart this kind of discussion?