Loosening the Chains

For our series of posts by experts-by-experience, Krista Marie Mills (pictured above) is exploring the 'positive side' of mental illness. Krista has blogged for the Huffington Post, Anxiety United, and Bring Change 2 Mind about her experiences. She has her own blog too, Loosening the Chains: Life with Anxiety and Depression.

When first diagnosed as being ‘mentally ill’ I genuinely believed that my life was over. I could no longer see myself moving out, gaining a degree, having a career and starting my own family. To me, 'mental' was a term used to describe the deranged psychopathic killers you see in those cheesy American movies, not an average twenty year old female who experiences nightmares after watching Crimewatch.

However, despite the given ‘title’, what I can now say is that mental illness has made me strive for more. Before falling ill I had lost all direction. My assignment grades were not reflecting my true ability, and I was skipping lectures due to hangovers and wanting to spend time with my friends. That has all changed now though as I graduated with honours last July, and am now working towards my Psychology Research Masters Degree. I have never been more focused and determined, as my dream now is to pursue my PhD and become a published author and Cognitive Behavioural Therapist - something I never would have considered before experiencing and living through the disorders.

Without becoming ill I would also have missed out on the opportunity to meet a number of amazing people, and form closer bonds with those already in my life. I transferred courses due to my dwindling grades, and it was then that I made a few genuine life - long friends, and built up a new support system. They say that people come into our lives for a reason, and I am now a firm believer of that. It is because of their support I can now take great pride in the fact that I am a much stronger person - an essential quality when dealing with the effects of mental illness. Before, I was, well, a ‘doormat’. I lacked the ability to voice my opinions and stand my ground, allowing my then friends and strangers to speak over me and sometimes treat me very poorly. This has all changed though as, while I remain a caring and compassionate person, I live by the motto that I am in enough emotional and psychological pain, why should I empower others to add to that?

So, yes, mental illness has turned my world upside down. It has left me isolated, constantly detached, scared of people, and scared of leaving my home. To take some of the control back though, and of course when I can think rationally, I do like to believe that a higher force, my guardian angel maybe, has set me this ‘challenge’ as a means of steering me in the right direction, ensuring that I am destined for bigger and better things as opposed to where I was headed. It helps.

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...

Imperfect Cognitions

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