Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, soon to join the new project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award. (A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 15th September 2023.) Some members of team EPIC: Matthew Broome, Ian Kidd, Dan Degerman, Havi Carel, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and Fred Cooper. Silence is an important phenomenon in mental health. But while philosophers have had much to say about the social silencing of people with psychiatric diagnoses, other ways in which silence can feature in psychopathology have been underexplored. In a recent workshop at the University of Bristol, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we sought to begin to address this neglect by exploring the different faces of silence in psychopathology. Ian Kidd opened the workshop with a talk that explored painful silences common in bereavement grief. In particular, he focused on four silences, ea...

This post is by Amy Chandler , a sociologist currently holding a Chancellor’s Fellowship in Health, through Arts, Design and Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In this blog she introduces her book, Self-Injury, Medicine and Society: Authentic Bodies , published by Palgrave Macmillan. Find out more about Amy's research . The book is the culmination of over 10 years research, and a much longer period of engagement and interest, in the practice of self-injury. In the book I focus on the different ways that people make sense of self-injury, through an analysis of accounts – or narratives – about the practice. Self-injury is commonly associated with mental ill-health, seen as ‘irrational’ or ‘impulsive’. As such, the ways in which self-injury is explained might be understood by some as an example of an ‘imperfect cognition’. People report injuring their bodies in order to make themselves feel better – how could this be possible? In the book, I explore the diverse...