Publications
Peer-Reviewed
"There's a pill for that: Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding and psychiatrization."Topoi, 2024. [link]
This paper brings the concept of affective scaffolding to bear on a much-debated controversy: the expanding use of psychiatric medications to treat an increasing range of human discontents. ‘Affective scaffolding’ refers to the variety of ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena. Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological underpinnings of distress and suffering to change how we feel. The paper develops an account of psychiatric drug use as affective scaffolding, and explores how psychiatrization – a complex social process through which psychiatry comes to influence more and more domains of human life – impacts this form of scaffolding. I propose that psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage a growing range of affective experiences. In some cases, I argue, this results in bad pharmaceutical scaffolding. Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding emerges when an agent is influenced to select and rely upon psychiatric drugs in attempts to exert individual control over distress and suffering where (1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and (2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the affective needs and interests of the agent.
Recently, Glackin et al. (2021) have suggested that how agency is impacted in addiction can be helpfully analyzed using the concept of affordances. They argue that addicted agents experience addiction-related affordances, such as action possibilities relating to drugs, drug paraphernalia, and drug-related activities, as aberrantly salient motivations for action. Building on this approach, we present a novel two-tiered affordance model of addiction. In doing so, we suggest that what is significant about the addicted person’s world is not simply what affordances are experienced as salient, but also the way in which the addicted person’s world is shaped by a dominant concern. It is not only that addiction-related affordances become more prominent as addiction progresses but that one’s plurality of concerns become monopolized by and funneled through addiction. Our model endorses Glackin et al.’s idea that addiction-related affordances become aberrantly salient, while proposing why they become and remain so. This way of viewing agency in addiction also brings to light important implications for recovery and treatment. For, if an addicted person adopts a new, even “socially approved”, dominant concern, there is a risk that the shape of addiction is preserved, even though the content changes, leaving an individual at the risk of addiction substitution or relapse.
Psychiatric language and concepts, and the norms they embed, have come to influence more and more areas of our daily lives. This has recently been described as a feature of the 'psychiatrization of society.' This paper looks at one aspect of psychiatrization that is still little studied in the literature: the psychiatrization of our emotional lives. The paper develops an extended account of emotion pathologizing as a form of affective injustice that is related to psychiatrization and that specifically harms psychopathologized people, i.e., people who are socially perceived to be mentally ill. After introducing an initial account of emotion pathologizing, as articulated in Pismenny et al. (2024), we extend the account by demonstrating how processes and practices of emotion pathologizing are informed by (1) the dominant biomedical approach to psychiatry and (2) sanism, a system of discrimination and oppression that disadvantages people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis, or are perceived as in need of psychiatric treatment. We then argue that emotion pathologizing can manifest as an affect-related hermeneutical injustice that disadvantages psychopathologized individuals by unfairly constraining how they make sense of and understand their own emotional experiences.
"Affective Scaffolding in Addiction." Inquiry, 2023. [link]
Theories of addiction have sought to explain how self-control is undermined in addiction. However, an important explanatory factor in addictive motivation and behaviours has so far been underexamined: emotion. This paper examines the link between emotion and loss of control in addiction. I use the concept of affective scaffolding to argue that drug use functions as a form of emotion regulation that, especially in certain psycho-socioeconomic conditions, can escalate into what I term addictive affective dependence. Addictive affective dependence is extremely motivating of drug use, and in this way contributes to the agent losing control. An upshot of the paper is that it predicts something that is known to be true about addiction treatment and recovery: strategies that address psycho-socioeconomic conditions are particularly successful in bolstering agency in addiction. Furthermore, my view explains why these strategies work. Thus, the view provides a conceptual framework for existing effective methods of addressing addiction.
"Addictive Craving: There’s More to Wanting More." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 27(3), 2020. [link]
The phenomenon of craving is widely taken to be a key feature of addiction, commonly appealed to in order to explain how addiction jeopardizes self-control, intentions, resolutions, and choice. The received view of craving is a neurobiological account which defines cravings as intense urges that result from the pathological effects of drugs on the dopamine system. In this paper, I argue that the received view of craving is inadequate; it misidentifies the content of addictive craving and fails to capture its phenomenology. I propose an alternative explanation according to which addictive cravings are psychologically complex desires that aim at emotionally significant experiences that are highly valued in the context of addiction. This alternative account helps explain why cravings are so intense and often extremely difficult to resist.
"What’s Wrong with the (White) Female Nude?" The Polish Journal of Aesthetics 41(2), 2016.
In “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?” A. W. Eaton argues that the female nude in Western art promotes sexually objectifying, heteronormative erotic taste, and thereby has insidious effects on gender equality. In this response, I reject the claim that sexual objectification is a phenomenon that can be generalized across the experiences of women. In particular, I argue that Eaton’s thesis is based on the experiences of women who are white, and does not pay adequate attention to the lives of racialized women. This act of exclusion undermines the generality of Eaton’s thesis, and exposes a more general bias in discussions of the representation of women in art. Different kinds of gendered bodies have been subjected to different kinds of objectifying construal, and the ethics of nudity in art must be extended to take such variation into account.
Invited
"The phenomenology of craving, and the explanatory overreach of neuroscience." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 27(3), 2020. [link]
This is a response to commentaries by Owen Flanagan and Douglas Porter on my article "Addictive Craving: There's More to Wanting More." In this reply I make clarifying points regarding my views on the relationship between neuroscience and phenomenology, and I expand on my original thesis, focusing especially on addiction treatment, harm reduction, and the role of testimony.
Other Writing
"Why we crave." Aeon magazine, September 2022. [link]
Under Review & In Progress
A paper on emotion hegemonizing as a form of affective injustice, with A. Gagné-Julien (under review)
A paper on emotion regulation and agency in addiction, with A. Snoek &F. Gammelsæter (under review)
A paper on the nature of suffering (in progress)
A paper on narrative agency and mental health discourse on digital platforms (in progress)
A paper on loneliness, interpersonal relationships, and addiction (in progress)