Imperfect Cognitions

Mattias Strand  is Consultant Psychiatrist at the  Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders . He is also a PhD student at  Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm , where his main research focus is on self‐admission as a potential tool in the treatment of severe eating disorders.  In this post, he discusses the background to, and main claims of, a recent paper, co-authored with  Manne Sjöstrand , Senior Researcher at the  Stockholm Centre for Healthcare Ethics  at Karolinska Institutet, " Self‐admission in psychiatry: The ethics ". In recent years, self-admission to inpatient treatment has become an increasingly popular treatment tool in psychiatry in the Scandinavian countries as well as in the Netherlands. In self-admission, patients who are well known to a service and who have a history of high utilization of inpatient treatment are invited to decide for themselves when a brief admission episode – usually 3-7 days at a time – is warranted. Patien...

This post is by Christopher Mole , Chair of the programme in Cognitive Systems at the University of British Columbia . He is the author of Attention is Cognitive Unison (OUP, 2010), and The Unexplained Intellect (Routledge, 2016). This post outlines the argument of his recent article, “ Autism and ‘disease’: The semantics of an ill-posed question ” (Philosophical Psychology, 8(3): 557-571). Discussions of autism are often euphemistic: We speak of ‘service users’ rather than patients; and ‘atypicality’ rather than illness. By avoiding the rhetoric of disease we avoid the implication that the autistic point of view is a defective one, which would be gone from a world in which everything was operating correctly. Those who do use the vocabulary of disease might reject such motivations, while congratulating themselves on their straight-talking, no-nonsense approach. This would, I think, be a mistake. According to one tradition, the mistake would be that of applying a ‘medical mod...