Ethics Lead, St. Joseph’s Health System, Hamilton
A. Lee de Bie, PhD (social work/gender studies), MHSc (bioethics), initially completed professional training in social work and practiced in community mental health crisis response. Lee’s interest in ethics emerged over the course of a decade of patient and community engagement/partnership and peer support facilitation with psychiatric survivor, neurodivergent, disabled, and queer/trans communities and related advocacy in health and education institutions. Lee’s scholarship has primarily contributed to Critical Disability Studies, Mad(ness) Studies, Ethics, Education, and Social Work, and draws on methods of qualitative inquiry, community and arts-based research, archival work, and critical literature syntheses. Their most recent postdoctoral fellowship research at a university teaching institute focused on (1) the articulation of Mad pedagogical ethics as an alternative approach to conversations about student mental health, and (2) decades-old histories of organizational accessibility/disability inclusion work to support equity and justice in education. Over the course of the Ethics Fellowship, Lee is excited to build on their MHSc work to further explore ethics from the standpoint of mental health service users and their social justice movements (referred to as Mad Ethics, branching off from disability ethics and feminist approaches to psychiatric ethics) and the challenges and possibilities these perspectives pose to bioethics.