CAPE
The Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE) promotes ethical reflection about issues of concern within and outside the University. In this capacity CAPE:
- sponsors public lectures and panel discussions on topics of ethical interest
- facilitates teaching and research about ethics
- serves as a link between the University and the professional communities of Northern California
- provides a context in which the University can engage in ethical reflection on its own work and mission.
Announcements
Mindfulness & Psychiatry
Cushions to Couches, Shramanas to Shrinks:
What is Lost and What is Gained When Mindfulness Becomes a Tool of Psychiatry
Wednesday
February 15
7:30 p.m.
PAC 134
Jason Clower
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies
CSU, Chico
Tracy J. Peng, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry and Osher Center for Integrative Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
Mindfulness-based interventions in health care have yielded positive and well-documented effects in a wide range of physical and mental disorders, ranging from hypertension and pain management to depression, as attested by a large body of research. Peng and Clower will describe the problems that must be navigated as clinicians uproot mindfulness practices from their birthplace in Southeast Asian Buddhism and transplant them in our radically different socio-cultural context. Just decades ago these techniques were used almost exclusively among celibate, mostly rural, male Buddhist clerics in majority-Buddhist countries who subsisted on alms from donors, in a uniquely Buddhist cultural context and belief-system. In their new, medicalized American form, these practices have been transferred into a therapeutic setting, taught by medical and psychological clinicians to a largely urban, mostly female, patient body, divorced from monastic rules governing sex, diet, deportment, and money, and independent of Buddhist beliefs about rebirth, merit, the supernatural, and enlightenment. This transplantation is "problematic" in the precise sense: that is, it necessitates decisions—possibly erroneous ones—about what is essential and inessential, what is culturally variable, and what trade-offs are or are not desirable. Peng and Clower explain what those problems are and how they have been settled, as well as pointing out the roads which have not been taken but may later be revisited.
This event is free and open to the public.