Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Valentina Cardella (Università di Messina). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, " Rationality in Mental Disorder: Too little or too much? ", published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality . Valentina Cardella Are people with mental disorders irrational? At first sight, this seems to be a trivial question: madness is the realm of non-sense. When someone tells you that her neighbour installed a tracking device in her abdomen, or that her internal organs are decomposing, you can’t help to wonder: how can she believe such impossible things? Where has her rationality gone? The common conceptualization of madness, which dates back to the Enlightenment, reflects this common-sense intuition: in people with mental disorders emotions are abnormal and unrestrained, and, on the other side, reason is severely affected. People with mental disorders can’t reason properly, healthy people can....

This post is by Awais Aftab (Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA). In this blog post he introduces and summarizes the article “ Mental Disorder and Social Deviance ”, co-written with Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed (Philosophy, Birkbeck College), and published in International Review of Psychiatry . Aftab also leads the interview series ‘ Conversations in Critical Psychiatry ’ for Psychiatric Times which is likely to be of great interest to the readers of this blog. Awais Aftab   I have been fascinated by the problem of distinguishing between “mental disorder” and “social deviance” since the early days of my psychiatric training. My exposure to the antipsychiatry philosophical literature had left me with a lingering, nagging doubt that unless there was some valid way of making this distinction, the legitimacy of psychiatry as a profession would stand on precarious and perilous ground.   Social deviance refers to actions or behaviors that ...

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...

This post is written by Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm. Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published widely in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and medical ethics. Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She has published widely in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. In this post,  Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm present their new edited volume "The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry". Although there has long been a close link between philosophy and psychiatry, it is only in the past few decades that philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a field in its own right, with its specific set of questions and themes generating interest from both traditional philosophers, and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, ps...