Geoscience Commits to Racial Justice. Now We’ve Got Work to Do

To be silent is to be complicit in our own destruction because racism destroys us all. But not being silent entails more than publishing statements. There is also the collective silence of inaction. —No Time for Silence

Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Situation

Both historically and currently, assaults on the black body and mind have been ubiquitous in American society, posing a counterargument to America as a postracial, color-blind society. Yet the collective silence of psychoanalysts on this societal reality limits our ability to explore, teach, and treat the effects, both interpersonal and intrapsychic, of race, racism, racialized trauma, and implicit bias and privilege. This silence, which challenges our relevance as a profession, must be explored in the context of America’s racialized identity as an outgrowth of slavery and institutional racism. Racial identifications that maintain whiteness as a construct privileged over otherness are an obstacle to conducting analytic work. Examples of work with racial tensions and biases illustrate its therapeutic potential. The challenge for us as clinicians is to acknowledge and explore our racial bias, ignorance, blind spots, and privilege, along with identifications with the oppressed and the oppressor, as contributors to our silence.

What Does It Mean to Be a Young African Woman on a University Campus in Times of Sexual Violence? A New Moment, a New Conversation

Sexual violence in the higher education is an epidemic of global proportions. Scholars conclude that the individual and collective silence that surrounds such violence enables its perpetration and that violence will only be eradicated when we break this silence. In this paper, we used two participatory visual methods (PVM), collage and storytelling, to explore what sexual violence at university looks like and what it means to woman students. Two groups of student teachers in two South African universities were engaged in collage and storytelling workshops in late 2017 and early 2018, respectively. We thematically analyzed the issues that emerged from the data, drawing on transformative learning theory to explore how our approach might help women students to break the silence around sexual violence and stimulate critical dialogue to address it. Our analysis suggests that these visual tools enabled deep reflections on the meaning and impact of sexual violence, particularly for women. In addition, the participatory process supported introspection about their experiences of sexual violence and their responses to it as bystanders in and around campus. More importantly, they discussed how they, as young women, might break the silence and sustain new conversations about gender and gender equality in institutions and beyond.

Reflections on Moral Courage

The author presents her reflections on the concept of moral courage that have evolved from her life’s work in the area of conflict and conflict resolution. Her profound analysis uncovers issues behind nursing’s collective silence when action may be needed.

Physician suicide prevention

Every year there is a medical school full of physicians who commit suicide. Depression is a major risk factor and physicians frequently fail to recognize their own depression and that or their colleagues. Even when they do, many of them avoid treatment. The greater knowledge of lethality of drugs and easy access to means can contribute to the higher suicide rate among physicians.Some studies say that training physicians are at particularly high risk of suicide, with suicidal ideation increasing more than 4-fold during the first three months of internship year. In Portugal, there are no reliable statistics about resident's suicide. We do not even talk a lot about it and the collective silence only compounds the problem – the refusal to speak perpetuates the stigma that mental health problems are signs of weakness or failure. Assess existing resources and best practices should be the next step to establish training programs to suicide prevention in these professionals, addressing response programs. As primary prevention, we should act in order to prevent healthy medical students or physicians from developing a condition that would lead to suicide. A randomized clinical trial in US with 199 residents from multiple specialties found that a free, easily accessible, brief web-based cognitive behavioural therapy program is associated with reduced likelihood of suicidal ideation among medical residents.It is also essential too early diagnose and treat after the illness onset. Moreover, it should exist a rehabilitation of suicidal physicians and their return to maximal function with minimal risk for recurrence.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.