אאוטינג נפשי: פרספקטיבה פילוסופית־אתית

Mental Outing: A Philosophical-Ethical Perspective

Ifat Schwartz

Abstract. This article examines the parallels between the LGBTQ closet and what it terms the "mental closet", focusing on the individual's choice whether to disclose characteristics that parts of society regard as devaluing. The first part examines the pressure exerted by various actors within the LGBTQ community on individuals to come out, a pressure that usually stems from a communal agenda of increasing visibility, which is in turn associated with reduced stigma. It also discusses outing in the LGBTQ context: its practices, its motives, and the voices that have opposed it. The second part raises a question that is partly hypothetical and partly already real: might people with mental disabilities also face forced "mental outing" for similar communal reasons, namely increasing the visibility of mental disability in the hope of reducing stigma? The article considers the implications of such outing through the ethical thought of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, drawing on his concepts of otherness, responsibility and distance, and on the proper ethical relation between responsibility and distance in the encounter between self and other.

Keywords: outing; mental disability; coming out; stigma; Emmanuel Levinas; ethics of responsibility