Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Lucienne Spencer , currently working on the Renewing Phenomenological Psychopathology project. In this post, she argues for the importance of an intersectional approach. Lucienne Spencer In the search for alternative approaches to psychiatry, there has been a reignited interest in phenomenological psychopathology: an approach that uses the phenomenological method to highlight the lived experience of the person with mental ill-health and invites a person-centred approach to diagnosis and treatment. Phenomenological psychopathology has its roots in Karl Jaspers’ seminal work General Psychopathology (1913), which surpassed the limited scope of pre-structured interviews and diagnostic criteria by examining the patient's life-world. After a long period during which phenomenological psychopathology fell into obscurity, new work in the field and amplification of the patient’s voice through mad-pride activism have led to a resurgence of the approach, giving it a va...

Mind Reading is the yearly conference of the collaboration between UCD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , researchers at the University ofBirmingham , and the Diseases of Modern Life and Constructing Scientific Communities Projects at St Anne's College, Oxford. Organised by Elizabeth Barrett (Consultant in Liaison Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s University Hospital) and Melissa Dickson (Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham) the conference, and project more generally, focuses on two simple questions: Do doctors and patients speak the same language, and how can we use literature to bridge the evident gaps? In what follows, I summarise just some of the talks and workshop sessions. How do cultural norms and expectations shape diagnosis and the experience of illness?  Melissa Dickson  showed us that, in 19th Century Britain, there were multiple literary and medical accounts of a psychosis-like state brought about by…green ...

In this blog post, Ian James Kidd (University of Durham and University of Leeds) and I, Havi Carel  (University of Bristol), talk about our research on epistemic injustice. Many of us are familiar with stories about doctors who don’t listen, large-scale healthcare systems that are impersonal and bureaucratic, and feelings of helplessness when trying to navigate these systems. In the UK these complaints have informed recent changes to healthcare policy, such as the NHS Patient Charter and the NHS constitution. But despite this greater awareness patients continue to voice concerns, which attest to persistent experiences of being epistemically marginalised or excluded by health professionals. Focusing on the epistemic dimension of these situations, we suggest that patients’ testimonies are often dismissed as irrelevant, confused, too emotional, unhelpful, or time-consuming.