Mental Health Awareness Week 2016

In this post we are providing some information about Mental Health Awareness Week (16-22 May 2016).

The Mental Health Foundation has decided to focus on relationships this year, based on the fact that good relationships are essential for mental health. The foundation invites us to make some new "relationships resolutions": see the details here.

Mind, the mental health charity, follows the lead of the Mental Health Foundation, and focuses on the quality of personal relationships: it invites us to look after each other better, by supporting people who might have mental health issues, in the family, among friends, and at work.

Rethink Mental Illness encourages people to become involved by hosting a tea party and read their series of guest blog posts by people with experience of mental health issues.

Michael Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and investigator in PERFECT, has worked extensively on the role of relationships in mental health and here are two of his recent publications you may find interesting: The experience of empathy by Rita Meneses and Michael Larkin; and an account of the experiential impact of hospitalisation on families which Michael wrote with several collaborators, including our network member Zoë Boden.

Please leave further suggestions for mental health awareness initiatives or useful readings in the comments!

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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