Just gonna put a thing out there: social narratives are pervasive. War veterans / emergency workers who experience trauma are encouraged to wear their experiences as a badge of honour; as an element of their identity to be be proud of. Our culture encourages this for the nationalistic effect it holds; but from a public health perspective, this kind of societal acceptance, and even elevation of status, helps to mediate the pathologies of trauma; recontextualising experience into adaptive responses to trauma and at once affirming the individuals lives, while also rewarding service to the hegemony and culture - the former being vital for the individual, while the latter can be rendered down to, at base, that expression of culture which engenders jingoism. We see it as a moral duty to these who have experienced the severe psychiatric hardship of unforseen circumstance to discharge ourselves to their well-being. But it is because that societal-half, that nationalism, of this narrative is seen as not applicable to Aboriginal people and refugees, due to their out-group-ness, that they are not granted that same moral duty and thus the same social narrative, or common story, for individual - and maybe societal - healing. The words that we use to describe and reduce whole peoples, Aboriginal and Refugee, have become so idiotically loaded, beyond definition, as basically meaning not us (Australian, ergo: human) that refugees and especially Aboriginal people are conditioned to be ashamed of their traumatic identities, which, obviously, is abhorrent, and compounds psychopathology and societal problems. How would it be if we changed our culture and mode to think of everyone as part of the in-group, how much better we would look after each other? Also, Gaza.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 05:12:14 +0000
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