Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Themistoklis Pantazakos and Gert-Jan Vanaken. Themistoklis (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Psychiatry at The American College of Greece and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. He works on phenomenological psychiatry, focusing on treatment methods that make sense of the point of view of client users and their communities.  Gert-Jan (he/him) is a post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven and the University of Antwerp. He works at the intersections of bioethics, disability studies and clinical autism research. His work focuses on developing neurodiversity-affirming autism care practices. Here, they argue that interventions for autism should address autistic mental health directly, and that a first-person approach is key for adapting psychotherapy to the needs of the autistic population. The full article is here , available open access. Themistoklis Pantazakos "[R]ight from the start, from the time someone came up with the

Today’s post is by Pablo Hubacher Haerle on his recent paper “ Is OCD Epistemically Irrational? ” (Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 2023). Pablo Hubacher Haerle is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is on the epistemology and metaphysics of the mind. He is particularly interested in desire, inquiry and the philosophy of psychiatry. Pablo Hubacher Haerle On the mainstream picture of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), people experiencing OCD have intrusive thoughts which lead them to form epistemically irrational beliefs. Consider this classic example:  Amelia is driving in their car. Suddenly, she hears a weird noise which she can’t identify. She forms the belief that she’s run someone over and spends hours looking for the supposed victim. But it is true that Amelia must have a belief that she’s run someone over? Following recent advances in the literature ( Kampa 2020 ; Taylor 2021 ), I consider it much more plausible to construe Amelia’s recurrent though

This blog post is by Alexandre Billon who presents his argument in a paper recently published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . This paper is a commentary on Kammerer and Frankish's article on what forms introspection could take. Alexandre Billon A couple of authors have suggested that schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder (DD) involve an enhancement of introspective abilities regarding certain important features of our experiences --- call that the Superintrospectionitis Thesis. The Superintrospectionitis Thesis and Schizophrenia In the phenomenological tradition, Blankenburg argued that reports of some people with schizophrenia ‘reveal, in a kind of immediacy the conditions of possibility of our existence that otherwise remain concealed’ ( Blankenburg, 2001 , p. 308). Likewise, Kimura (2001 , p. 335) suggested that schizophrenia might render manifest, through introspection, the ‘innate structure of all human beings that happens to be hidden in healthy people owin

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