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Showing posts with the label psychotherapy

Biomarkers and the Boundaries of Mental Disorder

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the American College of Greece and Visiting Professor of Parenting and Special Education at KU Leuven. His research regards the philosophy of psychiatry, particularly issues of evidence based diagnosis, as well as phenomenological psychiatry and the use of client expertise in psychotherapy. In this post, he discusses the themes of his recent BJPsych editorial . Themistoklis Pantazakos For seventy years psychiatry has hunted biological markers to anchor its diagnoses in hard science. From brain imaging to genomics, each new tool promised parity with the rest of medicine, yet no major mental disorder has a specific biomarker. This gap feeds two linked accusations: psychiatric categories don’t track real diseases, and, without biomarkers, psychiatrists wield excessive, culturally loaded authority, sometimes inflating pathology in step with pharmaceutical incentives. Critics imply that bioma...

Addressing Autistic Mental Health from the First Person

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos and Gert-Jan Vanaken. Themistoklis (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Psychiatry at The American College of Greece and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He works on phenomenological psychiatry, focusing on treatment methods that make sense of the point of view of client users and their communities.  Gert-Jan (he/him) is a post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. He works at the intersections of bioethics, disability studies and clinical autism research. His work focuses on developing neurodiversity-affirming autism care practices. Here, they argue that interventions for autism should address autistic mental health directly, and that a first-person approach is key for adapting psychotherapy to the needs of the autistic population. The full article is here , available open access. Themistoklis Pantazakos "[R]ight from the start, from the time someone came up with the ...

Philosophy of Psychedelics

Today's post is by Chris Letheby (Western Australia/Adelaide) on his new book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021). We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. “Classic” psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin are the objects of renewed scientific interest. Despite the chequered reputation of these substances, recent clinical trials have shown that psychedelics can be administered safely in controlled conditions, and may have a role in the treatment of various psychological maladies. There is even talk of a “new paradigm” in psychiatric treatment.  But psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (“psychedelic therapy”) has several unusual features that distinguish it from standard psychiatric treatments and raise intriguing questions. In my book Philosophy of Psychedelics (OUP 2021) I tackle some of these questions. The most striking feature of psychedelic therapy is that it involves the induction of a dramatically altered state of consciousness. Patients with anxiety, depr...

Women's Voices in Psychiatry

Today's post was written by clinical psychiatrist, Gianetta Rands. Women's Voices in Psychiatry was published in June 2018 by Oxford University Press. It is a collection of essays by women psychiatrists working, or who have worked, in the NHS. In addition, medical journalist Abi Rimmer writes on the history of women in British Medicine and Claire Murdoch, National Mental Health director at NHS England, reminisces about training as a registered mental nurse at Friern Hospital in the 1980s. This anthology has had a momentum of its own from the very start. I was just in the right place, at the right time. With encouragement from Baroness Elaine Murphy, psychiatrist, researcher, senior manager and cross bench peer, and support from several individuals and committees at Oxford University Press this book was on its way. In 2015, I retired from the NHS and presented an ‘exit seminar’ titled “Career Reflections of a 1970s Feminist” using my experiences of training a...

Working With Goals in Psychotherapy and Counselling

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...

Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

In this post, Colin Feltham, Emeritus Professor of Critical Counselling Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, and also an External Associate Professor of Humanistic Psychology, University of Southern Denmark, discusses his new book Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives . Some of his work that bears on similar themes includes Death  (In The Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, in press); Anthropathology: the abiding malady of the species (In The Evolution of Psychopathology, in press);  Keeping Ourselves in the Dark  (2015);  Failure  (2012). Although my academic and professional background was rooted in counselling and psychotherapy, my writing for the past ten years has also focused on what I call anthropathology (the principle of evolved, pervasive human pathology); on philosophies of failure and pessimism; on aspects of evolutionary psychology; and on the inescapably depressing features of human existence, most no...

Relatedness and Relationship Workshop

On 12th September 2016, Zoë Boden and Michael Larkin organised a workshop on Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health at Park House, University of Birmingham. Experts came from psychology, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, mental healthcare professions, and there were also several experts by experience, that is, people with lived experience of mental distress and carers. The workshop was the output of a project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation . The workshop started with a brief introduction by Zoë and Michael who talked about the themes emerging from a previous series of workshop they had run on relatedness. They listed three: Relationships can be either good or bad for mental health Distributed recovery, where recovery is seen as a feature of a system and not of an individual The contract between independence and dependance, and how the latter gets a bad press. Further overlapping themes were pictured in the diagram below, delegates discussed ...

The Phenomenological Bases of the Therapy of Severe Mental Disorders

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...