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Socially Masked by Ainara Gardia |
Blog on delusions, memory distortions, confabulations, biases and irrational beliefs.
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
Masked, Alone, and in the Dark
Tuesday, 24 January 2023
Responsibility and Blame in Practice
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Jen Garbett |
In 2011, Hanna Pickard created a framework that separates responsibility and blame, based on her experience with patients suffering from Cluster B (or “bad”) personality disorders.
Responsibility is regarded as an individual’s accountability for their actions. If one is responsible, they are aware of the actions they have taken and choose to perform these actions willingly. On the other hand, Blame is separated into two types: detached and affective. Detached blame consists of an emotionless judgement as to whether an individual is “to blame” for an action they took and is usually followed by some sort of consequence, such as prison time, whereas affective blame, the harmful type, consists of “negative reactions and emotions” toward the blamed individual.
Pickard believes that affective blame has a detrimental effect on treatment outcomes and thus should be separated from responsibility and discarded from therapeutic practice. But how do we go about putting this into practice?
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Group therapy |
This is because Norway takes a rehabilitation approach to the treatment of inmates while serving their sentence. Similar to the UK and US, the amount of individuals with personality disorders in inmate populations is significantly higher than the general population (Cramer, 2016). However, prison in Norway consists of what Pickard refers to as holding them accountable “but in an environment that [...] may do better to help them address their offending behaviour and enable learning and change”.
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Halden Prison |
The statistics speak for themselves in regards to the usefulness of the Responsibility without Blame framework in several areas where the percentage of individuals with personality disorders and general psychiatric disorders are high. These concepts are separable and the separation leads to successful outcomes regarding the aforementioned populations. In future, it would be exciting to see how this framework could apply to further systems.
Tuesday, 17 January 2023
Rethinking Conspiracy Theories
Today's post is by Matthew Shields at Wake Forest University, on his recent paper “Rethinking Conspiracy Theories” in Synthese.
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Matthew Shields |
What do you think of when you think of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists? The first image that typically comes to mind are individuals on dark corners of the internet spinning bizarre tales to explain some major event: that the moon landing was faked, that 9/11 was an “inside job”, that Sandy Hook was a false flag, or that Princess Diana was assassinated. You’re in good company: a great deal of the academic research on the topic takes just these cases to be paradigmatic of what and who conspiracy theories and theorists are. Many philosophers have followed suit. Researchers then go on to defend claims such as the following: conspiracy theorists are political extremists, not well-off socioeconomically, less educated, amateurs who lack and repudiate the relevant expert credentials. The problem of conspiracy theories, in turn, should be solved via state interventions and improving our practices of intellectual and moral education.
In my paper “Rethinking Conspiracy Theories”, I argue that these claims are all false or in need of radical revision, and I argue that this is so by these researchers’ and philosophers’ own lights.
To see why, consider the two most influential views according to which conspiracy theories are inherently flawed. On the first, conspiracy theories are epistemically self-sealed: no amount of counterevidence will change the conspiracy theorist’s mind. On the second, conspiracy theories are primarily forms of political propaganda and therefore fall prey to a host of epistemic flaws.
Suppose these views, or some combination of them, are right. Are the cases we started with the best examples of this phenomenon? Note a striking feature they have in common: they are all views espoused by individuals who are not part of the dominant political, economic, media, or educational institutions of their societies. (I call them ‘Non-DITs’: Non-Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists.) Perhaps this is no coincidence. It’s at the margins, some would argue, where we should expect to find uniquely flawed beliefs. But defenders of these philosophical views also concede, if only in passing, that individuals who are part of the dominant institutional landscape can also be conspiracy theorists, as they understand the latter.
In the paper, I argue that this is not only possible, but that conspiracy theories fabricated and promoted by those in positions of dominant institutional power are by far the best examples of the phenomena these philosophers take themselves to be identifying. I look in-depth at the Iraq-Al Qaeda conspiracy theory created and promoted by the Bush administration and the domestic and global McCarthyism scares promoted by both major American political parties. Both are ‘DITs’ (Dominant Institution Conspiracy Theories and Theorists). DITs, I show, are a much clearer form of political propaganda because they have a far more coherent political agenda in contrast to the mishmash of political beliefs behind Non-DITs. DITs are also more epistemically insulated because there is enormous institutional pressure not to dissent from the theory.
Moreover, DITs cause the most harm, and researchers tell us that we should study conspiracy theorists and theories precisely because of the harms they cause. By their very nature, DITs are produced by institutions with the largest share of resources and power, and their harms reflect this fact: wars are fought because of them, countries destroyed, atrocities committed.
Given philosophers’ own arguments regarding the flaws of conspiracy theories and the harms they cause, we therefore have excellent reason to treat DITs as our central examples rather than the cases that have dominated the academic literature. But if we do make this shift in paradigm cases, we will end up with very different conclusions: conspiracy theorists, it turns out, are primarily produced by those who adopt “mainstream” political ideologies, rather than the supposed extremists; they are often created and pushed by the best educated and most well off socioeconomically, by those widely viewed as experts and who have the backing of our most prestigious intellectual institutions.
Our understanding of who conspiracy theorists are, why they believe what they believe, and how resulting harms should be combatted must therefore all change radically if researchers in this literature are to remain true to their central claims.
Tuesday, 10 January 2023
Participatory Interactive Objectivity in Psychiatry
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Şerife Tekin |
As evident from the compelling body of scholarship featured in the Imperfect Cognitions blog, the last decade has been a very exciting time to be doing philosophy of psychiatry. What has been even more exciting for me, as a philosopher who has long been promoting the view that giving uptake to the first-person perspectives and testimonies of individuals diagnosed with mental disorders is necessary for enhancing rigorous research and ethical clinical practices, is the increased philosophical interest in thinking about how to include service users/ patients/ex-patients/survivors into enhancing research.
As can be seen, for example, from the line-up of speakers and their abstracts, in a recent conference organized by Sam Fellowes on “Philosophically Analysing the Role of Service Users in Psychiatric Research,” I am delighted that this topic is garnering a lot more interest and attention from scholars and service users in the field. While we still have a lot of work to do to convince psychiatric research and clinical treatment circles, I am encouraged to see the increased collaboration between philosophers and the service users to push this approach forward.
In “Participatory Interactive Objectivity in Psychiatry,” I focus specifically on the creation and revision processes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a document produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that identifies the properties of mental disorders and thereby guides research, diagnosis, treatment, and various administrative tasks.
I challenge the exclusion of patients from epistemic practices, through a historical overview of the DSM development since its inception in 1952. (I use the word "patient" to refer to the individual who is in a position of need due to the distress she is experiencing and who seeks help from a professional to address her condition. I recognize that “patients” are not homogenous, and some prefer being referred to as service-user/survivor/ex-patient. For my purposes in this article, I use these terms interchangeably.)
I respond to the objections provided by the APA on the inclusion of patients in the DSM creation process, on the grounds that it would impede psychiatry’s scientific aspirations for arriving at objective knowledge. I argue that there are epistemic – rather than exclusively social/political – reasons for including individuals with first-person experiences in the DSM revision process. Service users/patients/ex-patients/survivors are indispensable resources to enhance psychiatric epistemology, especially in the context of the crisis, controversy, and uncertainty surrounding mental health research and treatment.
My argument unfolds as follows.
- First, I outline the development process of the series of DSMs.
- Second, I examine the APA’s position that the inclusion of patients in the DSM’s epistemic practices would impede psychiatry’s goal to be objective.
- Third, I demonstrate that the notion of objectivity operant in the APA’s statements is insufficiently developed, and it leans heavily towards a logical positivistic understanding of what science is and how it can be objective.
- Fourth, I develop an alternative approach to thinking about objectivity in psychiatry, Participatory Interactive Objectivity (PIO), according to which patients’ inclusion is necessary for objectivity in psychiatry.
PIO takes cues from feminist epistemology, feminist philosophy, and science and technology studies, and promotes the idea that knowledge about mental disorders must be generated by a community of experts, including those with training-based expertise and those with experience-based expertise (e.g., Longino 1990, Collins and Evans 2002, Douglas 2004, Solomon 2015, Wylie 2015, Whyte 2018, Bueter 2021, Gagné-Julien 2021). Engagement between different kinds of experts would allow a diversity of standpoints to go through a process of transformative criticism, enhancing objectivity while also increasing public trust in the DSM.
Tuesday, 3 January 2023
Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology: The Launch
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Organisers Lucienne Spencer, Matthew Broome, and Roxana Baiasu |
Following introductions from the project team, our launch event was kicked off by our first keynote speaker Dr Robert Chapman from Sheffield Hallam University, with their talk entitled ‘Marx and Mental Health: Alienation in a Post-Fordist Era’. In this talk, Robert focused on experiences of mental illness and disablement in a post-Fordist era, with an emphasis on this era’s heavy reliance on cognitive and emotional labour.
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Presentation by Robert Chapman |
This was followed by our second keynote, Dr Lucy Bolton from Queen Mary University of London, with her talk entitled ‘Fear Itself, and Not the Statement “I Am afraid”: Film Phenomenology: Consciousness, Bodies, and Lived Experience’. Here, Lucy traces back the development of film-phenomenology in order to demonstrate that phenomenology as an approach to film is enabling for both the film and those who encounter it. She argued that this open, receptive, and inclusive orientation is grounded in the recognition of a variety of possibilities, not all of which are reducible to neat theoretical categories.
The launch event was brought to a close by our final keynote speaker, Professor Kevin Aho from Florida Gulf Coast University in the U.S., with his talk entitled: Phenomenological Psychopathology in the Age of Anti-Depressants. Kevin argued that the medicalisation of mental illness and the overprescribing of antidepressants is a very real problem and that antidepressants can be valuable from a phenomenological perspective insofar as they act on the meaning-structures that are disrupted in mental illness.
For those who missed our launch event, you’re in luck! We will be uploading all the talks onto our website. If you would like to sign up to the mailing list for the RPP project to get updates on our latest funding calls and events, we warmly encourage you to contact us.