Imperfect Cognitions

Currently on display at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is Christopher Samuel's Watch Us Lead . The exhibition explores themes of stigma, belonging and agency while encouraging conversations about under-representation, autonomy and the lived experience of disability. In this post, Kate Lynch reflects on the exhibition and the role museums can play in shaping whose stories are heard. One of the first works to catch the eye in this exhibition is a large stained glass panel. Stained glass is often associated with churches and public acts of remembrance, making it an especially powerful medium for an exhibition about stories that have been overlooked.   Pray For Me by Christopher Samuel Elsewhere, visitors encounter a series of portraits, each accompanied by a quotation and the opportunity to hear more. The stories touch on healthcare, education, employment, identity and family life, exploring not only the experience of stigma but also the ways participants have asserted their own ...

This post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck (MA), academic, expert by experience and choreographer, who recently attended and talked at  Too Mad to Be True III: Paradoxes of Madness , held on October 30–31, 2024, at the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium. The conference was organised by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Bart Marius (Director of the Dr. Guislain Museum), and Wouter Kusters (Foundation for Psychiatry & Philosophy).  Opening speech by Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University) This year’s theme explored the notion of contradiction and paradox in madness, philosophy, and related fields. With over 60 speakers, including five keynote presenters, the conference offered a remarkable diversity of perspectives that challenged conventional understandings of madness. Despite the breadth of content and the tight two-day schedule, the experience was intense, deeply enriching, and empowering.  Many speakers lived with or had personal experiences of madness, bringing an i...

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti who reports on a symposium was organised by Mark Flear to explore interdisciplinary perspectives (law, philosophy of psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, and more) on epistemic injustice, hosted by City University on 15th September 2023.  This is a report of some of the talks presented at the symposium. The other talks were given by Anna Drożdżowicz (on epistemic injustice and linguistic exclusion); Miranda Mourby (on reasonable expectations of privacy in healthcare); and Neil Maddox and Mark Flear (on epistemic injustice and separated human biomaterials).  The City Law School, venue of the symposium The first presentation was by David Archard (Queen’s University, Belfast) on lived experience and testimonial injustice. Lived experience is being increasingly used in debates on a number of controversial areas—as a source of special authority on a given subject. The appeal to lived experience often works in resisting claims that contradict live...

This blog post is by Zsuzsanna Chappell. Zsuzsanna is an independent scholar and research associate at the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics. She currently writes on the social philosophy and ethics of mental illness, and the role of researchers with subject-relevant lived experience in the human sciences. Previously, she held academic positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester and is the author of  Deliberative Democracy: A Critical Introduction , Palgrave 2012. Zsuzsanna reports from the third annual  Philosophy of Psychiatry and Lived Experience workshop . The workshop was held on 17-18 April 2023, online (hosted by the University of Umeå). The aim of these workshops has been to bring together  philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who self-identify as having lived experience of mental disability / difference, and are also writing on these topics.  University of Umeå Zsuzs...

This is the last in a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. Today, Rachel Temple , Public Involvement in Research Manager at the McPin Foundation , and members of the Young Person Advisory Group [YPAG] tell us about how the project impacted them.  In the course of the project, YPAG members provided detailed feedback on the application for funding, shaping research questions and outputs; contributed to the research, analysing videos of interactions between practitioners and young people struggling with their mental health; participated in public engagement events and prepared resources for schools on agency and youth mental health; shared their valuable insights, knowledge, and experience on blog posts and podcasts; and co-authored some of the project publications with the other members of the team.    Prior to working on the Agency project, I held a lot of shame and secrecy around my me...

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team provided some evidence of epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and Lisa Bortolotti discuss a new approach to protecting the sense of agency of young people meeting a crisis team for mental health problems. Clara Bergen Lisa Bortolotti In our project, we wanted to ask: How can practitioners avoid undermining a young person’s sense of agency in a mental healthcare encounter? We adopted an absolutely unique analytic approach to find out the answer. “We” are a group of six experts in philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, clinical communication, clinical practice, and public involvement in research (Interdisciplinary Academic Researchers), and five young people aged 17-25 with experience of accessing mental health services for diagnoses including post-traumatic stress disorder, ma...

This post is by Rachel Gunn summarising an article co-authored with Michael Larkin and published in Psychosis . The article is based on Rachel's PhD work at Birmingham. The research findings and conclusions, framed in terms of the Enactive Approach, are a move towards a need for understanding the phenomenology of a person’s experience in terms of sense-making within a person-environment system. Rachel Gunn A person ordinarily understands and negotiates the world based on familiar patterns derived from her cultural and historical experience. She is born into a family, the family consists of particular relationships and the family lives within a relatively circumscribed culture. Humans are flexible and adaptive. The difference between the lived experience of a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon Rainforest and an investment banker in the City of London highlights this flexibility.  There might be circumstances under which an alteration in a person’s lived experience would be so radical th...

There’s a lovely little church in Blackberry Hill, Bristol, nestled in the grounds of what was once the old psychiatric hospital. Step inside, and you’ll find a curious assemblage of artefacts, writings, recordings, drawings, and sculptures, telling the stories of the many mental health patients and practitioners of Bristol’s past. Welcome to Glenside Hospital Museum , which I’ll tell you a bit about now, before encouraging you to take a look for yourself if you’re ever over that way. (In terms of the content, I do discuss patient accounts of treatments, some that are quite upsetting.) At the start of the exhibition, we see the shift from dominant attitudes in 1600s Britain of seeing mental illness and distress as a punishment from the Christian god, or a mark of demonic possession, to the idea that the afflicted are sufferers for whom there might be a cure, and the birth of modern psychiatry as a medical field in the 1800s. You can peruse a detailed timeline developed by t...

The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network organized a workshop last June 20th at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. The theme was Phenomenology and Qualitative Health Research. The aim of the workshop was to explore different ways in which philosophical phenomenology is applied in qualitative research and address issues that arise from the increasingly collaborative nature of these fields. The organizers were Anthony Fernandez , Marcin Moskalewicz and Dan Zahavi . I was very glad to be included among the speakers and have the chance to present some of my work. This report includes a detailed summary of everyone’s talks. I thank everyone for sharing their notes to make this report. The first talk was Applied Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhaghen and University of Oxford) Zahavi a...

Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio . Her research program in philosophy of science and mind aims to enhance psychiatric epistemology by developing methods for supplementing the existing scientific literature with a philosophical study of the first-person accounts of those with mental illness.  She draws on the scientific literature on mental illness, philosophical literature on the self, and the ethics literature on what contributes to human flourishing to facilitate the expansion of psychiatric knowledge that will ultimately yield to effective treatments of mental illness. Here she discusses her article, “Brain Mechanisms and the Disease Model of Addiction: Is it the Whole Story of the Addicted Self? A Philosophical-Skeptical Perspective,” which recently appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction . In my chapter in this anthology, which brings together cutting-edge work on the sc...

Lynn-Marie Harper participated in the Philosophy of Mind workshop series for people with various interests in, and experiences of, mental health that Project PERFECT ran in partnership with Mind in Camden in the autumn of 2017.  Here, she shares some of her poetry.  She has always written but started to share her poetry when taking workshops with the poet, novelist and confidence inspiring tutor Aoife Mannix in 2010. S ome of the poems below are a direct response to the philosophy workshops, and some address life-experience more generally. The two poems I presented at Conway Hall at the conference on our last meeting of the Philosophy of Mind course were both written during the workshop series. The first, ‘Rocking the Foundations” was written initially as a response to an assignment on metaphor set by a poetry class tutor, Poet Philosopher Alan Murray. It served a purpose beyond the assignment though in that I could express my feelings and reactions to a longsta...

Does philosophy have a purpose outside academia? What does philosophy look like when it’s done beyond the walls of the lecture theatre and the seminar room? And who should get to do it? I got to think quite a bit about these questions recently. It was back at the start of 2017 that I travelled to London to meet some of the senior team from mental health charity Mind in Camden to discuss the possibility of developing a series of philosophy workshops, based on project PERFECT ’s research, and running them at Mind in Camden, for people with lived experience of unusual beliefs and experiences, and mental distress, as well as for service providers and mental health advocates. Mind in Camden runs training, support and capacity building services to benefit people who are struggling with mental distress, and I saw commonalities between its values and the sorts of conceptions of mental health and rationality that we’re arguing for through PERFECT. So, the organisation was a natural partn...

In this post, I report from the 20th Annual Meeting of the AEP and WPA Psychopathology Sessions. The symposioum took place at the Hospital Corentin Celton in Paris on the 9th and 10th of December 2016. Researchers in psychopathology and philosophers gathered to present their findings and reflections on the psychopathology of the lived body and its exposure. On the first day, Luis Madeira talked about abnormal bodily phenomena (ABP) and how these symptoms are experienced in patients with affective disorders, psychosis, and particularly schizophrenia. These features are subjective and at the same time experienced as out of control. In patients diagnosed with manic depression, the body is represented as a nebulous existence, a quasi-inefable constellation of feelings, feelings of inner burden and paralysis which is caused by a lack of motivation, with patients often wondering: “It is in me but, what should I do?” When the diagnosis is schizophrenia, reports show an increa...