Neal Milner

Participating the Public: Group Process, Politics, and Planning:

The use of new group process techniques in the review of projects and in developing plans and policies can result in meetings that are more civil, more efficient, more satisfying to participants, and more useful in terms of the information that is generated. However, planners need to be aware that facilitated processes can be used to deflect discussion of value issues, to control difficult participants, and to manipulate participative processes. While the techniques of improved facilitation practices are much discussed and new checklists for improved facilitation tactics are being developed, larger issues about deliberative politics, about the relationships between facilitated meetings and agency agendas, and about the criteria for appraising the outcomes of facilitated processes are not yet getting the attention they deserve. This essay describes the extensive use of group processes for planning in a variety of substantive settings in Hawaii. Based on this experience, we offer some norms of good practice that indicate how we might be more attentive to the micro-politics of group processes and their use in planning processes.

The symbols and meanings of advocacy

Abstract This article looks at the emergence of mental health advocacy as political reform. It is not an assessment of advocacy programs but rather a more sweeping, less detailed look. (For assessments of advocacy see Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1979; American Bar Association Commission on the Mentally Disabled, 1979.) Over the last few years virtually every group or organization involved in mental health policy has described its activities as being advocacy on behalf of the mentally ill. These groups differed greatly from each other in terms of goals and values. How and why, then, did they all describe their programs and strategies with the same general term? I argue that one reason for advocacy becoming so pervasive a part of the rhetoric of mental health reform is that advocacy has a powerful symbolic content. I further argue that it is this very powerful symbolic character that limits mental health policy makers from seeing some key differences that are crucial to the dynamics of mental health advocacy. The last sections of the article elaborate upon the conflicts in advocacy.

Feeble Echoes of the Heart: A Postcolonial Legal Struggle in Hawai`i

This article analyzes the legal discourse of native Hawaiians opposed to proposed federal recognition. We argue that this contemporary contest over the means of self-determination reveals the ways in which law and rights provide inescapable idioms for indigenous sovereignty at the same time that they form the primary obstacles that must be overcome. Strategic maneuvering through this postcolonial legal dilemma is shown to produce new ideas of laws authority, challenging dominant notions of place and time, as well as the performance of legal recognition.

Models of rationality and mental health rights.

The sudden and often controversial development of mental health rights may blind us to the fact that these rights have developed unevenly. For example, the right to treatment for those involuntarily committed to mental institutions has emerged much more quickly and comprehensively than has the right for these individuals to refuse treatment. Why is this the case? The emergence of rights is related to changes in ideologies. It is also related to the mobilization of legal resources. This article focuses on the link between ideological change and the uneven emergence of these two rights. The ideologies are based on psychiatrists’ beliefs and perceptions of mental patient rationality. The right to treatment and the right to refuse treatment respectively are related to two quite different models of rationality. Psychiatric textbooks and other general work in mainstream psychiatry show that the model of rationality consistent with the right to treatment has been far more prevalent and central to practicing psychiatry than has the model that is closer to the right to refuse. The first part of the paper briefly documents the uneven emergence of the two sets of rights. Part II develops the models of rationality and shows how the respective rights are related to the models. The third part demonstrates the prevalence and centrality of one of the models consistent with the right to treatment, while Part IV looks at how and why the other model is subordinated.