Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham). Rosa is a consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health. Here she talks about a recent paper she co-authored with an interdisciplinary group of international researchers at the Universities of York, Melbourne, Warwick and Ohio State. The paper entitled “Subjective experience and meaning of delusions in psychosis: systematic review and qualitative evidence synthesis” has been published in The Lancet Psychiatry and is available Open Access . Rosa Ritunnano This paper is the result of a big team effort, and my hope is that it will encourage delusion and psychosis researchers across disciplines to go beyond commonplace assumptions (deeply ingrained especially within clinical psychiatry) about the nature and meaning of delusional phenomena. The aim of this research was to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of delusional phenomena based on the experiential knowledge of those with live...

Today's post is by Rosa Ritunnano (University of Birmingham and Melbourne), consultant psychiatrist and PhD candidate at the Institute for Mental Health, Birmingham, UK. Here she talks her recent paper which has been awarded the 2021 Wolfe Mays Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers by The British Society for Phenomenology (BSP) and the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP).  Rosa Ritunnano In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance may improve conditions of hermeneutical marginalisation as experienced by individuals who have attracted a diagnosis of psychosis (although I believe that the suggested approach can be transferrable to other conditions). In cases of hermeneutical injustice , one is unable to understand their own experience or effectively communicate it to others because they lack an adequate conceptual framework for making sense of this experience. The classic example used in the literature on hermeneutical injust...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team explained why young people may have heightened risks of experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and  Rose McCabe  provide evidence that young people's sense of agency is sometimes undermined in such encounters. By analysing video recordings of police interactions, courtroom cross-examinations, and political news interviews, researchers have learned a lot about how institutional figures challenge what other people have felt or experienced.  For example, police and lawyers use subtle practices like asking questions that imply inconsistency or implausibility ( Stokoe et al 2020 ), anticipate a compromising response ( Drew 1992) , or imply disagreement ( Jol & van der Houwen 2014 ). Lawyers and political interviewers may take an adversa...

Today’s post is provided by  Katherine Puddifoot ,  Assistant Professor of Philosophy , Durham University. Here, she introduces her article, " Stereotyping Patients ", that has recently appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy. Should healthcare professionals respond to the social group status of their patients, automatically associating patients of particular social groups (e.g. certain races, religions, social classes) more strongly than they automatically associate patients of other social groups with certain concepts, traits and characteristics? In other words, should healthcare professionals be influenced in their clinical judgement and decision making by automatically activated stereotypes or implicit biases? This can produce unethical outcomes (Matthew 2018 ). Where healthcare professionals associate members of some social groups with certain traits, for example uncooperativeness, this can lead to group members receiving poorer quality treatment. However...

Duncan Law  is a consultant clinical psychologist at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and University College London. He is interested in quality improvement across child mental health systems, better collaborative practice, Goals Based Outcomes (GBOs), better use of evidence informed practice, and authentic participation. Mick Cooper  is a professor of Counselling Psychology at Roehampton University. He is the author of Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling (Sage, 2015). In this blog post, Duncan talks about their new co-edited volume Working with Goals in Psychotherapy and Counselling . Recent evidence suggests that working with goals in counselling and psychotherapy can support positive therapeutic change. Goals can empower clients and give them hope: helping them feel that they have the capacity to act towards achieving their desired futures. Goals can help focus, and direct, clients’ and therapists’ attention, building a bette...

The workshop Challenges To Wellbeing: The Experience of Loneliness and Epistemic Injustice in the Clinical Encounter originated from a multi-disciplinary conversation about wellbeing and happiness. Exploring the theme of challenges to wellbeing, this conversation brought together academics from across the University, practitioners, and campaigners. The workshop was hosted by Lisa Bortolotti and Sophie Stammers  for project PERFECT , and co-organised and funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies  (IAS). It was held at the Centre for Professional Development (CPD) in the Medical School on the 22nd of November 2017. This is a detailed report on the talks given that day. The workshop was divided in three sessions. Session One was dedicated to Themes from Project PERFECT . Kathy Puddifoot started with an Introduction to Epistemic Injustice. She defined epistemic injustice and spoke about the different types that have been identified. Kathy explained that since th...