Synopses & Reviews
"Kolb has written a wonderful book that takes us inside agencies serving victims of sexual and domestic violence. With a clear-eyed yet empathetic perspective, he shows how advocates define and manage their identities in the face of ongoing, often conflicting pressures from clients, government bureaucracies, and their own principles and ideologies."
Rose Corrigan, Drexel University
"In Moral Wages, Kenneth Kolb takes us into the world of domestic violence advocacy work, introducing us to voices of victim advocates. In the face of anemic state, local and federal resources these advocates work for moral wages,” positive feelings not available in all lines of work. However, as Kolb documents, male allies benefit disproportionately from this symbolic reward system, thus providing us a cautionary tale highlighting the gendered dimensions of emotion work, even in organizations designed to address gender inequality."
C.J. Pascoe, author of Dude, Youre a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School
"Domestic violence shelters are staffed by dedicated women and men who perform gut-wrenching labor for few extrinsic rewards. So why do they do it? In this sensitive ethnography, Kenneth Kolb reveals that, more important to these workers than money and prestige are the symbolic rewards they receive. They get the right to believe they are good, virtuous, and moral beings. But these symbolic rewards are doled out unequally on the basis of gender. Kolb finds that men have to do less work than women do to receive their moral wages, revealing mens advantages even in the predominately female world of compassionate labor."
Christine Williams, University of Texas at Austin
"The research is very well done and yields many interesting findings, unlike anything else that is out there. It will be very good in the classroom, and it should have wide appeal for practitioners as well. There is a great deal of new information and new ideas in this study, and a book written from the perspective of a male advocate is a welcome addition to the field."
Jennifer Dunn, Texas Tech University
Review
“Immerses the reader in the at times raw, often maddening and messy arena of a psychiatric emergency room doctor's life.”
Review
“A talented writer and a compassionate doctor who understands what works best for him and his patients.”
Review
“Writes with grace, honesty, and humility about the psychiatrist's task of judging the mind and heart of another human being.”
Review
“A gripping, and at times unsettling, account.”
Review
“At times witty and humorous, it is also enlightening and can help to synthesize the many elements of current cultural dilemmas of psychiatric care.”
Review
“This fast-paced book feeds our fascination with the world of medicine and our interest in the lives of others.”
Review
"A useful contribution to qualitative literature on human service processes and encounters."
Review
"I highly recommend this insightful, lyrically crafted study of work in an emotion-laden organization that deals with women victims of interpersonal violence."
Synopsis
Moral Wages offers the reader a vivid depiction of what it is like to work inside an agency that assists victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Based on over a year of fieldwork by a man in a setting many presume to be hostile to men, this ethnographic account is unlike most research on the topic of violence against women. Instead of focusing on the victims or perpetrators of abuse, Moral Wages focuses exclusively on the service providers in the middle. It shows how victim advocates and counselorswho don't enjoy extrinsic benefits like pay, power, and prestigeare sustained by a different kind of compensation. As long as they can overcome a number of workplace dilemmas, they earn a special type of emotional reward reserved for those who help others in need: moral wages. As their struggles mount, though, it becomes clear that their jobs often put them in impossible situationsrequiring them to aid and feel for vulnerable clients, yet giving them few and feeble tools to combat a persistent social problem.
Synopsis
The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes readers behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering and repair shattered lives. As he and his colleagues encounter patients who are hallucinating, drunk, catatonic, aggressive, suicidal, high on drugs, paranoid, and physically sick, Linde examines the many ethical, legal, moral, and medical issues that confront today's psychiatric providers. He describes a profession under siege from the outsidehealth insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, government regulators, and even patients' rights” advocatesand from the insidebiomedical and academic psychiatrists who have forgotten to care for the patient and have instead become checklist-marking pill-peddlers. While lifting the veil on a crucial area of psychiatry that is as real as it gets, Danger to Self also injects a healthy dose of compassion into the practice of medicine and psychiatry.
Synopsis
Linde's
Danger to Self is a warm, candid and appealing account of being an emergency room psychiatrist. Linde captures the non-conformist, hard-boiled style of the psychiatrists who work in this setting.”Tanya Luhrmann, author of
Of Two Minds"Linde illustrates academic points with his personal experiences quite deftly. He comes across as a warm-hearted, thoughtful, dedicated physician doing a difficult job as best he can. His book offers an authentic behind-the-scenes look at how a psychiatrist thinks and practices." Frank Huyler, author of The Blood of Strangers
In this provocative first-person account, Danger to Self, psychiatrist Paul Linde takes us to the troubling front lines of America's mental healthcare crisis. With one in three people experiencing some form of mental illness in their lifetimes, this is a story that needs to be told. Linde waves a red flag that can't be ignored.”Kemble Scott, author of SoMa and The Sower
Danger to Self is an excellent account of treating acute mental illness. Dr Linde presents powerful stories of disturbed minds and circumstances, of lives in upheaval due to psychosis, addictions, and despair. It is also the story of the story of a psychiatrist who tends to those who are ill enough to warrant treatment in a psychiatric emergency room. This is a well-written book, compassionate, and well worth the reading.”Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind
Synopsis
This book explores the moral lives of mental health clinicians serving the most marginalized individuals in the US healthcare system. Drawing on years of fieldwork in a community psychiatry outreach team, Brodwin traces the ethical dilemmas and everyday struggles of front line providers. On the street, in staff room debates, or in private confessions, these psychiatrists and social workers confront ongoing challenges to their self-image as competent and compassionate advocates. At times they openly question the coercion and forced-dependency built into the current system of care. At other times they justify their use of extreme power in the face of loud opposition from clients. This in-depth study exposes the fault lines in today's community psychiatry. It shows how people working deep inside the system struggle to maintain their ideals and manage a chronic sense of futility. Their commentaries about the obligatory and the forbidden also suggest ways to bridge formal bioethics and the realities of mental health practice. The experiences of these clinicians pose a single overarching question: how should we bear responsibility for the most vulnerable among us?
Synopsis
Paul Brodwins rich and historically sensitive ethnographic account,
Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry, is a highly accessible introduction to the ethical dilemmas of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT). While clearly demonstrating the systems flaws, this dynamic and well-researched work avoids the common tendency to villainize, lionize, or otherwise simplify its professionals, allowing their ethical quandaries to become our own.” E. Summerson Carr, author of
Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety"Everyday Ethics is a crucial account that deserves to be widely read. A serious anthropological contribution to medical ethics. This book unpacks community care-so key to global health-and does the same for the ethics of practice. It leaves the reader with wonder, puzzlement and ultimately acknowledgment of the impossible yet unavoidable struggles at the heart of caregiving."Arthur Kleinman, author of What Really Matters
"This is a masterful, disturbing ethnography of ethical decision making at 'the rough edges of community psychiatry."Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, co-author of Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity
About the Author
Paul Brodwin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Adjunct Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is the editor of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, author of Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power, and coeditor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface. Nowhere to Hide
1. The ER Doc: Who's Calling the Shots?
2. The Rookie: Bruno's Man Down
3. The Scrambler: How to Prevent a Murder
4. The Psychodynamo: Learning to Listen with a Professional Ear
5. The Jailer: If You Want to Go, You Have to Stay
6. The Jury: Playing the Suicide Card
7. The Clairvoyant: Whose Life Is It Anyway?
8. The Speed Cop: Talking to Tina
9. The Witness: Trauma Underlies the Pain
10. The Judge: Playing God from a Psychiatric Standpoint
Epilogue. Straight from the Heart
Notes
References