Imperfect Cognitions

The author of the post is Walter Glannon , who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada. He has held other academic appointments at McGill University and the University of British Columbia.  Walter grew up and received all of his education in the US. Following a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the University of Chicago, for 5 years (2000-2005) he was clinical ethicist at 3 hospitals in Montreal and Vancouver. This is largely how he developed his interest in research and clinical aspects of psychiatry. Advances in psychiatric research and clinical psychiatry in the last 30 years have given rise to a host of new questions that lie at the intersection of psychiatry, neuroscience, philosophy and law. Such questions include: Are psychiatric disorders diseases of the brain, caused by dysfunctional neural circuits and neurotransmitters? What role do genes, neuro-endocrine, neuro-immune interactions and the environment play in the ...

In this post, Reinier Schuur, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews  Dominic Murphy  (pictured below), Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, on current debates in the philosophy of psychiatry. RS: Many people have said that over the last 20 years, philosophy of psychiatry has grown, as has the interaction between philosophers and psychiatrists. Do you agree? Do you think this interaction will increase, and what should the role of philosophers be in psychiatry, and vice versa? DM: I suppose it has grown. When I started thinking about psychiatry in the mid-90’s (I started my PhD in 1994), back then there very few philosophers of psychiatry. Reznek had just written his  book  ,  Jennifer Radden  and  Stephen Braude  had written, and  Ian Hacking  was about to start his writing. The field was very small and it has certainly grown. I think probably psychiatrists are interacting with philosophy. There h...

What is the relation between mental disorders and physical disorders? Is it possible to find a biological basis for mental disorders? What purpose would a reduction of mental disorders to physical disorders serve? These are some of the questions addressed at the workshop ‘Pathologizing Mind and Body’ organized by Jonathan Sholl and Marcus Eronen. Philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists approached this topic from different angles and highlighted problems and recent developments. In the first talk, Ignaas Devish stressed the distinction between suffering and pain, claiming that suffering is not a phenomenon that is amenable to diagnostic operationalisation and medicalization. He argued that because of this, victims of traumatic events should be offered an ethical debriefing in addition to psychological debriefing, which allows them focus on their suffering and the existential problems they face from a non-medical perspective. Arantza Exteberria talked about ‘Interacti...

In this post, Reinier Schuur (University of Birmingham) reports from this year's Cognitio Conference  for young researchers in cognitive science. From the 8th to the 10th of June, I attended the Cognitio 2015 conference on "Atypical Minds: the Cognitive Science of Difference and Potentialities" at the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada (UQAM), where I also gave my first conference talk on my doctoral research. The conference atmosphere was incredibly welcoming and friendly, and a great place to make new contacts and give my first conference talk. Many topics presented at the intersection between philosophy, clinical neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology were addressed. The topics of the talks can roughly be divided into four categories: delusions, synesthesia, autism, and the RDoC. One of the reasons why philosophers have been so interested in delusions, and other psychiatric symptoms and conditions, is that explaining such symptoms and conditions prese...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in sessions 2 and 3, emphasising those themes that have already been discussed in the blog. (If interested in session 1 of the conference, I reported on it last week). Session 2: Genetics, Neuroscience and Mental Disorder Neuroscientist  Pamela Sklar  asked "How may genetics change our understanding of mental illness?" and she focused on schizophrenia as a "mystery", that is a disorder that is both inherited and very common. Thousands of DNA alleles are involved in the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The difficulty in identifying the genetic bases of such disorders made some people think that research in this area was doomed to failure. But both for bipolar disorder and for schizophrenia some regions that increase risk have been discovered s...

This post is by Massimiliano Aragona, philosopher at the University of Rome .  Massimiliano Aragona The DSM-5 ( American Psychiatric Association 2013 ) has been published in the midst of unusual controversy. Criticisms had always been advanced, but in the past the DSM system was the dominant paradigm (the 'Bible of Psychiatry'), so they were considered ‘marginal’ complaints by: psychoanalysts, antipsychiatrists, experts of various fields worried about an excessive medicalization of human sufferance, and psychopathologists concerned with the progressive abandonment of deep qualitative phenomenological analysis in favour of superficial quantitative diagnostic criteria. Such criticisms are important per se, but were largely neglected at the time. Today it is different, because it is the credibility of the DSM itself that is in question. And, along with the DSM, it is a general way to conceive psychiatry which is in crisis: 'the neo-Kraepelinian paradigm established...

Bill Fulford This post has been published on behalf of Bill Fulford and Matthew Broome. Bill Fulford is Fellow of St Catherine’s College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick. Matthew Broome is Senior Clinical Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. Matthew Broome DSM is dead! Long live RDoC! In April this year Thomas Insel, Director of the world’s wealthiest neuroscience funder, the NIMH (the National Institute for Mental Health at Rockville, Maryland), pronounced the then shortly to be launched DSM-5 already dead. Introducing NIMH’s own classificatory framework, the RDoC (Research Domain Criteria), Insel warned that ‘NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.’ There has since been something of a row-back: Bruce Cuthbert, writing with the endorsement of NIMH, notes that Insel’s blog 'was addressed to the research community… rat...