Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Jasper Feyaerts, who is discussing a paper he co-authored with Mads G Henriksen, Stijn Vanheule, Inez Myin-Germeys, and Louis A Sass, entitled "Delusions beyond Beliefs", and published in The Lancet Psychiatry . With this link, there will be free access to the article for a few weeks. Jasper Feyaerts Delusions are commonly conceived as false beliefs that result from epistemic failures to represent reality correctly. This view has been dominant throughout the history of psychiatry, and continues to inform contemporary research and practice. In explanatory research, it underlies (neuro)cognitive attempts to explain delusions in terms of impairments or biases in cognitive reasoning. In clinical practice, it motivates cognitive-behavioral strategies focusing on the rational evaluation of delusional appraisals. Yet despite being the standard view of delusion in psychosis research, this conception has not gone entirely unchallenged. Most notably in the tradition ...

This post is by Anthony S. David , Director of the Institute of Mental Health at University College London. Here he talks about his new book, Into the Abyss: a neuropsychiatrist’s notes on troubled minds (Oneworld Publications, 2020). When I submitted a title for my first non-academic book I did so with some trepidation. Apart from sounding somewhat negative, wouldn’t people think it was something about mountaineering, a cautionary tale perhaps? As I explained to my concerned editor, the intended readership like those of this blog would be, “interested in themes at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry” and would instantly pick up the reference to Jaspers, the early 20th Century philosopher-psychiatrist. Somehow he wasn’t reassured.  But the abyss metaphor is a powerful descriptor of the challenge of understanding the experience of the person who is mentally ill – to reach out across the abyss into what Jaspers called ‘an impenetrable country’, the...

Today's post is by Joseph Houlders, doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. In this post, he reports on the book launch for the new Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology . The event took place on 22 July 2019, and was chaired by one of the editors of the handbook, Professor Matthew Broome, Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham. Five contributors to the handbook spoke at the launch: Professor Christoph Hoerl, Understanding, explaining and the concept of psychic illness   Dr Clara Humpston, Thoughts without thinkers: The paradox of thought insertion   Professor Femi Oyebode, Consciousness and its Disorders  Dr Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Phenomenology and Psychiatric Classification Dr Gareth Owen, Psychopathology and Law: what does phenomenology have to offer?  The launch began with an apt question: to what extent can we understand and explain psychic illness? The central theme of the aft...

Today's post is by Peter McKenna. He is a psychiatrist with some background in psychology, currently working full-time in research in Barcelona . He introduces his new book Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . I have been interested in delusions for a long time and around five years ago decided to try and write a book on the topic. The result, for better or worse, is Delusions: Understanding the Un-understandable . The ‘un-understandable’ of the title references Jaspers’ contention that delusions are a) psychologically irreducible, ie they cannot be derived from other psychological experiences, either normal or abnormal; and b) are unmediated, ie they are immediate rather than being the product of reflection (for a good and concise account of Jaspers’ views, see Walker, 1991). Apart from the work of Jaspers, who was a philosopher as well as a psychiatrist and whose thoughts on delusions have influenced successive generations of clinicians, I made ...

Today's post is by  Bill (KWM) Fulford  and Tim Thornton . Bill is Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick.    Tim is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire. Bill Fulford Tim Thornton What is delusion? Few questions have so vexed philosophers in recent philosophy of psychiatry. An invitation to contribute to Thomas Schramme and Steven Edward’s Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine (Springer, 2016) gave us a welcome opportunity to review progress. The philosopher Naomi Eilan characterized the challenge of delusion as solving simultaneously for understanding and for utter strangeness. Karl Jaspers, the great philosopher-psychiatrist of the early twentieth century and founder of modern descriptive psychopathology, would have approved. He famously thought delusions just too strange to be within the reach of empathic understand...

This post is by Wolfram Hinzen , who is research professor at ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research), currently investigating language as an aspect of human nature, cognition, and biology at the Grammar and Cognition Lab . In this post, he summarises his recent paper "Can delusions be linguistically explained?", co-authored with Joana Rossello and Peter McKenna and published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Wolfram Hinzen Explanations of delusions often revolve around meaning and knowledge. Indeed the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1959) famously argued that all delusions could be understood as a radical transformation in the awareness of meaning, which became immediate and intrusive attribution. How such an abnormality might give rise to statements such as ‘I am Jesus’, ‘the Royal family are stealing my inventions’ and in extreme cases ‘I have fathered 7,000 children’ or ‘I have invented a machine to run the whole solar system powered ...

The 17th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology – International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry INPP 2015 – with the topic ‘Why do humans become mentally ill? Anthropological, biological and cultural vulnerabilities of mental illness' - was held in Frutillar, Chile, on October 29th, 30th and 31th, 2015. The Conference has been organised by the Centro de Estudios de Fenomenología y Psiquiatría, Universidad Diego Portales , Santiago, Chile, in coordination with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry, INPP, to promote and share cross-disciplinary research from the field of Philosophy and Mental Health.  All the lectures and seminars were housed in Teatro del Lago  (picture above) located on the lake in Chilean Patagonia, with an inspiring natural setting and stunning architecture. The programme consisted of 23 plenary conferences, 54 oral presentations, 6 panel discussions, and more than 30 posters of researchers c...

Giovanni Stanghellini A course entitled The Phenomenological Bases of the Therapy of Severe Mental Disorders took place on April 9-11 in Florence. Organized by the  EPA (European Psychiatric Association) Section of Philosophy and Psychiatry, the course accommodated 30 practitioners and philosophers from all over Europe to offer an advanced practical workshop on Phenomenological Psychotherapy. The participants learned therapeutic skills from such professionals as Giovanni Stanghellini, Thomas Fuchs, Andrea Fiorillo, Andrea Raballo and Borut Skodlar. The first day started with an intensive but fascinating introduction by the course’s director Giovanni Stanghellini , who took his audience through the theoretical underpinnings of the phenomenological model, with philosophical references to Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas. Stanghellini argued that a human being ought to be seen and understood as a dialogue with Alterity. It is exactly in a dialogue, where the true essence of l...

This post is by Michael Larkin , co-investigator for project PERFECT . Michael Larkin I’m a psychologist, and I’m based in the clinical psychology training team at the University of Birmingham. I have a particular interest in phenomenological approaches to psychology, and most of my research involves asking phenomenological questions about various forms of anomalous or distressing experience (how do people make sense of these experiences?), or about the responses of various psychosocial and healthcare services to those experiences (what is it like to receive these interventions?). I’m particularly interested in the relational and cultural context of the answers to both of these questions, and this makes an interesting bridge to the work of PERFECT. From a psychological perspective, PERFECT is interesting because it invites us to see ‘delusions’ (strange beliefs, disproportionate commitments, or ‘factually-erroneous cognitions’) as having some functional value – some epistemic ...