David Pilgrim
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 263231 |
|---|---|
| NOME | David Pilgrim |
| PRENOMES | David |
| SOBRENOME | Pilgrim |
| ASSINATURA | PILGRIM D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Liverpool |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8140-8734 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 76 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 213 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1984 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
A critical realist understanding of cancel culture in academic settings
Cancel culture has been linked, in recent times in Western democracies, to the suppression of freedom of expression in both academic and non-academic settings. I offer critical realism as a resource to trace its conditions of possibility, focusing on the former. After the necessity of academic freedom to facilitate critical realist inquiry is noted, the emergent features of cancel culture are described and accounted for. I discuss the historical …
The false memory controversy
Identity Politics
Race, ethnicity and the limitations of identity politics
This paper argues that identity politics is impeding respectful deliberative democracy. Its starting point is an analysis by Loïc Wacquant which problematizes the relationship between race and ethnicity. Wacquant's discussion covers the biological and social ontology of race, the importance of the culture of individualism in the USA and the general limitations of identity politics. I argue that those limitations are the result of restricting the …
British mental healthcare responses to adult homosexuality and gender non-conforming children at the turn of the twenty-first century
The roots of the recent controversy about how mental health professionals should respond to gender non-conforming children are traced. To make historical sense, this paper distinguishes between epistemological (discursive) and ontological (non-discursive) aspects and describes their features, since 1970. This helps to clarify some of the confusions at the centre of the still heated debate about sexuality and gender identity today. In the concludi…
Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology
An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of …
Constraints on Free Academic and Professional Debate in the UK About Sex and Gender
Transgender debates and healthcare
The meta-theoretical resource of critical realism (CR) is deployed in order to examine transgender and healthcare. CR treads a middle way between positivism and postmodernism, within post-Popperian discussions of the philosophy of natural and social science. It focuses on the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a phenomenon under investigation. In this case, the focus is on the emergence of debates about transgenderism in healthcare. T…
Critical realism as a continuing resource for biological research
This paper aims to illustrate the advantages of critical realism for biological scientists and to offer an example, for others in philosophy and the social sciences, of applied natural science in practice. A case study is offered using a first-person account of the latter. This relates to research on biting flying insects that are vectors of some infectious diseases in animals and humans. The account illuminates a range of matters that can be und…
Preventing mental disorder and promoting mental health
In this paper, I consider the debates surrounding the prevention of mental disorder and the promotion of mental health. In so doing, I offer some provisional insights into the wider notion of wellbeing. All three topics – mental disorder, mental health and wellbeing – imply generative mechanisms of some sort. By considering these mechanisms as ontological entities, we can appraise the relationship between human agency and its biological, social a…
Logiques des transformations du champ psychothérapeutique en Angleterre, France et Pays-Bas
Depuis une vingtaine d’années, le champ psychothérapeutique, en France, en Angleterre et aux Pays-Bas, est engagé dans de profondes transformations. Dans une perspective socio-historique, cet article rend compte de trois temps : la formation d’un champ psychothérapeutique spécifique dans chacun des trois pays puis l’extension de la psychothérapie démédicalisée dans les années 1960-70 ; la constitution en priorité de santé publique des troubles co…
Heraclitan resonances and Romanticism
A foundational axiom about flux and impermanence from Heraclitus, alluding to the river, has been an important reference point for the philosophy of critical realism. This article begins with this, and then looks to the use of the river as a metaphor about life, or some aspects of it, within the lyrics of some popular songs in the twentieth century. Six examples are outlined to illustrate the commonalities and differences between these selected s…
Health and Social Care Diversity Among Individuals with Longstanding Physical and Psychological Health Problems
This paper examines differences in health-and-social care utilisation for individuals with physical and/or mental health problems. Logistic regression models are used to determine disparity in the percentage of General Household/Lifestyle Survey participants with physical compared to mental health problems receiving disability benefits or health care services between 2000 and 2011. Our findings of a relative underutilisation of secondary health c…
Grand Hotel Abyss
Critical Realism for Psychologists
This is the first dedicated text to explain and explore the utility of critical realism for psychologists, offering it as a helpful middle ground between positivism and postmodernism. By introducing its basic concepts, Pilgrim explains critical realism to psychologists and shows how the interface between the natural and social worlds, and the internal and external, can be used to examine human life. This both/and aspect of human life is important…
Mental health, subjectivities and forms of neuroscience
Reclaiming reality and redefining realism
Recently an acrimonious debate has emerged about transgenderism. Trans-activists defending the full spectrum of the latter have advocated a form of identity politics based upon individual self-definition. However, gender-critical feminists (within another current of identity politics) have disputed the legitimacy of these bids for self-determination, especially when considering men who are claiming to be women. These contrasting positions are exa…
Medical diagnosis
Medical diagnosis is sometimes used by critical realists and others as an exemplar of a form of inference across time in which a current empirical observation points backwards to the conditions of its emergence and forwards to a possible future outcome or progression. Accordingly, its practice warrants critical exploration to confirm its legitimacy as a philosophical reference point. The strengths and weakness of the exemplar are appraised using …
The transgender controversy
Jason Summersell responded to my article – ‘Reclaiming reality and redefining realism: the challenging case of transgenderism’ – by suggesting that I have made an inferential error about ontology. In this paper, I refute his objection and argue that his position does not take seriously the unresolved public policy threat posed by the commercially-inflected and politicized world of trans ideology. The realpolitik of trans-activism contains legal a…
Psychologists and torture
This article introduces the challenges of providing psychological assessments of people seeking asylum in the wake of their reported torture. These challenges invite professionals to consider ontology (what happened to people, physically and psychologically) and epistemology (the reports about what happened and how those reports are interpreted). Critical realism is well-positioned to underlabour for the process of understanding a human rights vi…
Critical realism and mental health research
This chapter outlines the key features of critical realism (CR) and compares them with other traditions in social science from positivism and idealism. It contrasts the philosophy with positivism, on one side, and strong social constructivism, on the other. The chapter offers case studies about psychiatric diagnosis and child sexual abuse to illustrate these differences. It also introduces some major elements of CR. Those elemental aspects of CR …
The Perils of Strong Social Constructionism
This article tests the adequacy of social constructionism from a critical realist standpoint by examining a single social problem in some detail: child sexual abuse (CSA). It explores a continuum of positions in the research literature. These range from: strong social constructionism, derived from social and historical relativism, which can be read as effectively justifying CSA; to a position that, while accepting 'weak constructionism', prioriti…
Child sexual abuse, moral panics and emancipatory practice
This article explores the shared interest of sociologists and social workers in moral panics when considering the public policy challenge of child sexual abuse. Enacted paedophilia is one aspect of the latter. The utilisation of moral panic reasoning in pro-paedophile arguments in the past 50 years is described and the recent version of that reasoning is addressed critically. A critical realist framework is adopted to offer immanent and explanato…
Moral panics and social work
This is a rejoinder to a response from Mark Smith and his colleagues to my original article in this journal on social work and moral panics. At the outset, a brief concession is made to a couple of points from them but I go on to defend the main propositions in my original article
Incorrigible conduct and incorrigible diagnoses
Pulling down churches
A study of the British Mental Health Users’ Movement (MHUM) is reported, based upon interviews with some of its participants. These accounts are analysed in terms of three main themes: ideology and policy; relationships between users and non‐patients; and relationships between the movement and statutory and voluntary agencies. The data are discussed in relation to international comparisons and with regard to preceding opposition to traditional ps…
The survival of psychiatric diagnosis
Psychiatrists as social engineers
Service users' views of psychiatric treatments
Compared to other types of patients, the views of mental health service users have been attended to infrequently by sociologists. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data on patients' views of their psychiatric treatments. The data was derived from a piece of action research conducted by the authors on behalf of the mental health charity MIND. With the exception of anti-depressants, chemotherapy is substantially criticised, as is Ele…
English mental health policy under New Labour
This article reviews the changes in mental health policy in England under the jurisdiction of New Labour governments between 1997 and 2007. These are considered in relation to recurring policy questions about: the structures and processes involved in responding to mental health problems; professional jurisdiction for mental health problems; the conditions under which mental disorder should be lawfully controlled; links with wider health and welfa…
Some implications of critical realism for mental health research
Psychologists and torture
This article introduces the challenges of providing psychological assessments of people seeking asylum in the wake of their reported torture. These challenges invite professionals to consider ontology (what happened to people, physically and psychologically) and epistemology (the reports about what happened and how those reports are interpreted). Critical realism is well-positioned to underlabour for the process of understanding a human rights vi…
On being unreasonable in modern society
There are many grounds for arguing that people with a range of disabilities have more in common than they have differences. However, those grounds to date have not resulted in a unified social movement. This paper examines one possible reason for that lack of unity: the particular force of being unreasonable in modern society. However, being unreasonable is not limited to those with a psychiatric diagnosis, nor does a lack or loss of reason take …
Survival and its discontents
Sub‐divisions of labour in health settings are common and medical dominance and encroachment from competitors are well known. This article considers this general picture but in specific relation to mental health work in Britain and its particular features of recent contestation. British psychiatric orthodoxy has faced challenges to its legitimacy for over a century. However, since the 1980s, in the wake of de‐institutionalisation and a new shared…
Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences
Pickersgill, M. and I. van Keulen ( eds ) Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences. Bingley UK : Emerald Group Publishing 2011 , £77.95 (hbk ) xx11+ 324 pp, ISBN: 978-1-84855-880-9 If you are an old fashioned materialist and realist, then picking up this volume is very reassuring. It has a solid scull-like case, with a design of white and grey matter, signalling what might be going on inside. And what is going on there is very complicated. T…
New 'Mental Health' Legislation for England and Wales
The faltering emergence of new 'mental health' legislation in England and Wales between 1998 and 2005 is described. The slow progress largely reflected widespread opposition to the content of the government's plans to replace the Mental Health Act of 1983. That opposition was formalised in the Mental Health Alliance, an umbrella organisation which included user and professional groups as well as voluntary sector bodies. This article highlights th…
The Failure of Diagnostic Psychiatry and some prospects of Scientific Progress Offered by Critical Realism
A brief overview is provided of sociological and historical critiques of Western psychiatry before focusing on pre-empirical, non-empirical and empirical aspects of psychiatric diagnosis. These are then discussed using the analytical devices of the ontic fallacy, the epistemic fallacy and generative mechanisms. It is concluded that mental disorders do not really exist but particular presenting problems of unintelligibility, interpersonal dysfunct…
The hegemony of cognitive-behaviour therapy in modern mental health care
Cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) has been a central plank in the mental health policies of many Anglophone countries in recent years. This emphasis reflects the triumph of modern rationalism in two senses. First, the appeal of CBT to policy makers rests largely on its claims of being evidenced-based and quickly effective. Second, it is committed to a view of eudemonia (the good life) in which rationality predominates over non-rationality to gene…
Logiques des transformations du champ psychothérapeutique en Angleterre, France et Pays-Bas
Depuis une vingtaine d’années, le champ psychothérapeutique, en France, en Angleterre et aux Pays-Bas, est engagé dans de profondes transformations. Dans une perspective socio-historique, cet article rend compte de trois temps : la formation d’un champ psychothérapeutique spécifique dans chacun des trois pays puis l’extension de la psychothérapie démédicalisée dans les années 1960-70 ; la constitution en priorité de santé publique des troubles co…
Critical realism, psychology and the legacies of psychoanalysis
The discipline of psychology has been poorly represented in critical realist texts to date. This is despite Bhaskar’s use of psychoanalytical concepts to underpin his concept of the dialectic. By comparison, other aspects of social science, such as sociology and economics, have a well-established body of critical realist texts. The original approach to psychoanalysis was analogous to the critical realist ontological-axiological chain. It moved fr…
Lessons from the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales
In 2009, the Mental Health Act Commission for England and Wales was closed down and its functions subsumed in separate organisations in the two countries. Its final biennial report, issued that year, focused on coercion and consent. This article uses some aspects of the report to discuss the implications of lawful psychiatric coercion being predicted by social group membership (correlated with race, age and gender). The work of the Commission fur…
Mental Health Policy and the Politics of Mental Health
English Mental health policy and the politics of mental health are complex topics, studied by a wide range of academic disciplines using a variety of methodologies and styles of analysis. This article offers a broad unifying analytical framework which includes this range and variety while bringing some order into a field which can overwhelm individual scholars. The framework has three tiers: macro, meso and micro. These refer respectively to glob…
Transgender debates and healthcare
The meta-theoretical resource of critical realism (CR) is deployed in order to examine transgender and healthcare. CR treads a middle way between positivism and postmodernism, within post-Popperian discussions of the philosophy of natural and social science. It focuses on the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a phenomenon under investigation. In this case, the focus is on the emergence of debates about transgenderism in healthcare. T…
Historical resonances of the DSM -5 dispute
This article begins with arguments evident at the time of writing about the 5 th revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The historical lineages of those arguments are international and not limited to the USA (the current focus in the DSM-5 controversy). The concern with psychiatric diagnosis both internationally and in the USA came to the fore at the end of the Second World War with the construc…
The British welfare state and mental health problems
It is now over thirty years since Claus Offe theorised the crisis tendencies of the welfare state in late capitalism. As part of that work he explored ongoing and irresolvable forms of crisis management in parliamentary democracies: capitalism cannot live with the welfare state but also cannot live without it. This article examines the continued relevance of this analysis by Offe, by applying its basic assumptions to the response of the British w…
Contested professional rationales for the assessment of mental health problems
The centrality of personal relationships in the creation and amelioration of mental health problems
An interdisciplinary case is made for the centrality of personal relationships in the creation and amelioration of mental health problems. Taking the work of John Bowlby as a starting point, the article summarizes accumulating evidence from the past 50 years about the link between childhood adversity and adult mental health problems. Evidence is also reviewed about contemporary interpersonal impacts on adult mental health from natural social sett…
Prescribing benzodiazepines in general practice
General practitioner (GP) prescribing has been identified as an arena that has broad social and political implications, which stretch beyond individual outcomes for patients. This article revisits aspects of the controversy about prescribing benzodiazepines (or 'minor tranquillizers') through an exploration of contemporary views of GPs. In the 1980s the prescribing of these drugs was considered to be both a clinical and social problem, which brou…
The social organisation of mental illness
Mental health and citizenship
The view that changes in mental health legislation and treatment advances have improved the status of mental patients as citizens is examined critic ally. Principles of civil and political rights set out by the United Nations and the National Council for Civil Liberties are used to facilitate this examination.This is followed by a discussion of the implications arising in the context of contemporary debates about community care. The disadvan tage…
Some implications for psychology of formulating all illness as deviancy
Formulating all illness as deviancy can be offered as a basis for reconciling the psychological characteristics of physical and mental illness. This paper considers the epistemological background to this reconciliation and discusses some of the theoretical, practical and methodological implications for clinical psychology. Particular attention is given to the role of values in psychological activity and the need to recognize the central legitimac…
Human Oddities
Beating Against the Barriers
Commentary
Race and ‘schizophrenia’
(1989). Race and ‘schizophrenia’: A reply to Ineichen. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 161-163
Radical mental health policy
This article considers the development of a mental health policy from the Socialist Health Association between 1986 and 1988. The discussion docu ment at the centre of this policy development (Goodbey To All That?) is summarised and its reception in the Socialist Health Association ans else where reported. The difficulties in developing the policy, and the range of responses to it from different sections of the labour movement, are then dis cusse…
Mental health and citizenship
The view that changes in mental health legislation and treatment advances have improved the status of mental patients as citizens is examined critic ally. Principles of civil and political rights set out by the United Nations and the National Council for Civil Liberties are used to facilitate this examination.This is followed by a discussion of the implications arising in the context of contemporary debates about community care. The disadvan tage…
Tuning in the Spirit
Data on registered Catholic parishioners in the Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life were used to test two theories that account for Catholics' exposure to religious television programming: the informational needs theory and the situational cross-pressures theory. Results from discriminant function analyses provided support for both hypotheses. The findings also indicated that younger, single Catholics who displayed low levels of involvement …
Pulling down churches
A study of the British Mental Health Users’ Movement (MHUM) is reported, based upon interviews with some of its participants. These accounts are analysed in terms of three main themes: ideology and policy; relationships between users and non‐patients; and relationships between the movement and statutory and voluntary agencies. The data are discussed in relation to international comparisons and with regard to preceding opposition to traditional ps…
Rhetoric and nihilism in mental health policy
Thomas Szasz, crazy talk and the myth of mental illness
In this article, Szasz's analysis of ‘crazy talk’ is considered in the context of his wider critique of psychiatric theory. We argue that Szasz has performed an important service by drawing attention to psychiatric prejudice regarding the causes of abnormal behaviour, and by pointing to the role of values in psychiatric decision making. However, Szasz may be criticized for his oversimple analysis of the concept of ‘illness’ and for his failure to…
Service users' views of psychiatric treatments
Compared to other types of patients, the views of mental health service users have been attended to infrequently by sociologists. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data on patients' views of their psychiatric treatments. The data was derived from a piece of action research conducted by the authors on behalf of the mental health charity MIND. With the exception of anti-depressants, chemotherapy is substantially criticised, as is Ele…
Integrated mental health care
The social organisation of mental illness
Something Old, Something New
Whilst sociology has taken a consistent interest in psychiatry, theoretical and methodological approaches have varied. This paper summarises three versions of the sociology of psychiatry (social causationism, interpretive micro-sociology and structuralism). These are then contrasted with the more recent post-structuralist emphasis on deconstruction. The latter has emphasised a discursive shift in psychiatry since Victorian times, from brain to mi…
Accounting for Disability
This paper has two aims. First, it will summarise the findings of a study of the views and experiences of adults with acquired physical impairments. This entailed taking open-ended accounts from respondents in order to elicit their concerns and experiences. The paper will focus on two aspects of data from the study: views about health and social services; and those about citizenship. The second aim of the paper is to situate the role and status o…
Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis
Mental Health Policy and the Politics of Mental Health
English Mental health policy and the politics of mental health are complex topics, studied by a wide range of academic disciplines using a variety of methodologies and styles of analysis. This article offers a broad unifying analytical framework which includes this range and variety while bringing some order into a field which can overwhelm individual scholars. The framework has three tiers: macro, meso and micro. These refer respectively to glob…
Precious Lord
Precious Lord David Pilgrim (bio) Reverend Aaron James Jamison sat, alone, crying in his car, three blocks from the church where he was to preach in twenty minutes. He cried hard. Mutilating surgery. That’s what the doctor said. If only your father had come earlier. But, of course, he hadn’t. Believing in signs, he prayed instead. Prayed! Because that’s what old black folks do; they pray. Because Deacon Jamison believes that Jesus can fix it, wil…
Buzzard
A Short Introduction to Clinical Psychology
The Social and Historical Context of the Profession The Knowledge Base of Clinical Psychology Clinical Psychology Training Careers in Clinical Psychology Changing Practice and Changing Roles Experts and Expertise Internal and External Relationships
Short Introduction to Clinical Psychology
The Troubled Relationship between Psychiatry and Sociology
The alienated relationship between psychiatry and sociology is explored. The two disciplines largely took divergent paths after 1970. On the one side, psychiatry manifested a pre-occupation with methodological questions and sought greater medical respectability, with a biomedical approach returning to the fore. Social psychiatry and its underpinning biopsychosocial model became increasingly marginalised and weakened. On the other side, many socio…
A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness
Psychiatrists as social engineers
Sociology (54 obras) · Psychology (51 obras) · Epistemology (34 obras) · Political science (31 obras) · Mental health (29 obras) · Psychiatry (28 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Medicine (25 obras) · Philosophy (25 obras) · Mental Health and Psychiatry (18 obras)