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...

Models of Madness

In today's post John Read (in the picture above) presents the recent book he co-authored with Jacqui Dillon , titled Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. My name is John Read. After 20 years working as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, mostly with people experiencing psychosis, I joined the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. There I published over 100 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g., child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis. I also research the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health. In February I moved to Melbourne and I now work at Swinburne University of Technology. I am on the on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis and am the Editor...

Imperfect Cognitions

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