Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Sanja Dembić. Sanja is a research associate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member of the “Human Abilities” Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Here, she discusses her recent book 'Philosophy of Mental Disorder: An Ability-Based Approach'.  What is it to have a mental disorder? There are many different answers to this question in the literature, the most prominent being those that refer to the concept of biological dysfunction. These views are usually developed with reference to clear cases of bodily disorders (or: diseases). The idea behind them is that if we have an adequate analysis of the concept of bodily disorder, we will also have an adequate analysis of the concept of mental disorder. In contrast, my aim was to develop a concept of mental disorder that is developed with reference to clear cases of mental disorder. In this book, I offer an ability-based view of mental disorders. I argue that an individual has a mental disorder if and o...

In this post Linda Gask presents Finding True North: The healing power of place, a book published in April 2021 by Sandstone Press.  What does it mean to ‘recover’ from depression? The answer you receive to this question will vary by the profession, training, experience, and ideological stance of the person you ask. Some will speak in terms of a reduction in the number of symptoms of depression you have ticked ‘yes’ to. Others will focus on regaining ability to function in the world, particularly in your relationships and ability to work. How do you ‘recover’? Is it simply about taking the tablets, going to therapy- or both? Or is there more to it?  What about mindfulness, and exercise, and all the other suggestions people helpfully provide? There will also be a few who will admonish you for your choice of words to describe a shade of normal human unhappiness and add to the guilt you were feeling for being depressed in the first place. Personally, I’ve found the writing of D...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hop...

Today's post is by Derek Bolton . He is Professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology at King’s College London. His latest book co-authored with Grant Gillett  is The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: Philosophical and Scientific Developments  (Springer Palgrave, 2019, Open Access). Imagine how odd this would be: You or the family were attending clinic (say neurology, orthopedic, pediatric or psychiatric), enquired about causes and cures, and the reply referred to complexity and the Biopsychosocial Model. You go home and look this up, and happen upon criticism by many authoritative commentators to the effect that the Biopsychosocial Model, popular though it is, is scientifically, clinically, and philosophically useless. This is actually where we are and this is the problem we diagnose and address in our book. We propose a formulation of the problem along the following lines: The 1960s and ‘70s saw the beginnings of systems theory approaches in biology, ...

Today I interview Rani Lill Anjum on her exciting project CauseHealth . Rani works as a philosopher of science at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) and is the Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science (CAPS), always at NMBU. LB: How did you first become interested in causation in the health sciences? RLA: I started thinking about causation in medicine back in 2011, when I was working on my research project Causation in Science. Many of my collaborators already had an interest in philosophy of medicine, and I started thinking that if causation was complicated in physics, biology, psychology and social science, then medicine must be the biggest challenge. After all, a person is the unity of them all, as physiological, biological, mental and social beings. Also, our health is causally influenced by or even the result of what happens to us at all these levels. LB: What would you describe as the main finding of CauseHealth now that...

Today's post is by Christina Moutsiana  (pictured above), who is Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on perceptual and cognitive biases which she investigates using a variety of neuroscience tools, behavioural paradigms, and psychophysics. In this post she discusses some of her recent research on belief updating and brain architecture (see Moutsiana et al. 2015 for more details). We make decisions every day, some of which are critical to our health and wellbeing. These decisions are driven by the beliefs we hold. But do we form beliefs in an accurate manner that allow us to avoid harm and maximize reward? Cognition is not impervious to error, especially when emotion comes into play. One of the most robust cognitive biases is asymmetric belief updating; the tendency for healthy individuals to alter beliefs about their future to a greater extent in response to good information compared with bad information. Decision ...

On 4th June I attended some talks at the  Valuing Health Conference  at University College London (see picture above), where the themes of Dan Hausman’s book,  Valuing Health  (Oxford University Press, 2015) were discussed. The event was organised by Jo Wolff and James Wilson. The intended audience was philosophers, economists, and also healthcare policy makers. The conference started with a brief overview of the arguments in the book, presented by Dan Hausman (University of Wisconsin) . There are two basic problems the book was meant to address: (1) we need to be able to compare health improvements brought by different policies; (2) we need to know what to do with the information (e.g., maximise health). Thus, the book provides answers to the following questions: How do we assign values to health states? How do we assess policies on the basis of those values? What role should people play in assigning values to policies? The discussion raises further questi...

In this post, the new book Health, Illness and Disease: Philosophical Essays (Acumen 2013) is presented by its two editors, Rachel Cooper (Lancaster University) and Havi Carel (University of Bristol). Health, Illness and Disease Much effort goes into keeping us healthy. We are regularly told we should drink less, use condoms, and eat more fruit. Sometimes, we comply. All agree that health matters, but figuring out exactly what counts as ill-health remains tricky. Conditions such as cancer and tuberculosis stand out as being fairly clear-cut cases of disease. But increasingly we seek treatment for conditions other than those that straightforwardly lead to suffering and death. We worry about “risk factors” - nebulous conditions that might, at least for some, be linked to future ill-health. The disease status of those with aches, pains and fatigue has always been contested, but in an era of both economic and legal protection for those with “bona fide” disorders, and also incre...