Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, soon to join the new project EPIC (Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare), funded by a Wellcome Discovery Award. (A version of this post appeared on the EPIC blog on 15th September 2023.) Some members of team EPIC: Matthew Broome, Ian Kidd, Dan Degerman, Havi Carel, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies, and Fred Cooper. Silence is an important phenomenon in mental health. But while philosophers have had much to say about the social silencing of people with psychiatric diagnoses, other ways in which silence can feature in psychopathology have been underexplored. In a recent workshop at the University of Bristol, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, we sought to begin to address this neglect by exploring the different faces of silence in psychopathology. Ian Kidd opened the workshop with a talk that explored painful silences common in bereavement grief. In particular, he focused on four silences, ea

Today's post is by Elliot Porter.  Elliot is a political philosopher. His research examines autonomy and abnormal psychology, focusing particularly on affective disorders. During his MSc he sat as the student Mental Health Officer on Glasgow University 's Students’ Representative Council, and the university’s Disability Equality Group. He currently sits as a member of a Research Ethics Committee in Glasgow, which approves medical research for the Health Research Authority .      It is widely thought that serious mental disorder can injure a person's autonomy. Beauchamp and Childress list mental disorder among the controlling influences that render a person non-autonomous. Neither Raz nor Dworkin allow their theories to conclude that people with mental disorder are in fact autonomous.  Happily, recent research tends not to take mental disorder as a homogeneous phenomenon, in favour of examining different disorders and symptoms individually. Lisa Bortolo

On 12 March 2018 the project PERFECT team hosted an event for the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham, entitled: Start, Stop, Pause: Keeping Mood on Track , with the aim of sharing information about bipolar disorder, and the psychological interventions that have proved successful in improving people's quality of life and avoiding their relapse. The session was led by Lizzie Newton who works as a clinical psychologist on the Mood on Track programme and an expert by experience describing how bipolar disorder impacted on his life, and what his involvement was with the programme. Their joint presentation included information about what bipolar is, about how a diagnosis is made and people can get help, about the Mood on Track programme, and about what we can all do to support people who may be experiencing changes in mood. The session ended with some questions and comments from the audience. Bipolar disorder presents as a pattern of changes in how people t

On June 9th, the University of Birmingham hosted a workshop, " Cognition, Affect, and Motivation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues ", sponsored by Project PERFECT and the Mind Association . The conference brought together academics and students from philosophy and related disciplines, as well as members of the public, who were interested in issues relating to the interaction between cognition, affective responses and motivation. It aimed to foster interdisciplinary discussion around philosophical questions about the relation between these three drivers of human behaviour. Maura Tumulty ’s talk focussed on how we can take control over our mental states, especially those with strong affective content. Many of our mental states are controlled by our judgements. However, Tumulty discussed states that are in tension with our sincerely endorsed judgements.  Say, for example, that a person is predisposed to be attracted to smoking although she sincerely endorses

This post is by Angharad de Cates  (pictured above), a Senior Registrar in General Adult Psychiatry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Unit of Mental Health and Wellbeing at the University of Warwick. Broadly, her research interests are neurocognition, self-harm, mood disorder, and mental health promotion and wellbeing. In this post, she summarises her recent article “ Can we use neurocognition to predict repetition of self-harm, and why might this be clinically useful? A Perspective ” co-authored with Matthew Broome, and published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry in January 2016. The first issue in research about self-harm is to define what it actually is, which in part depends on which style of terminology you wish to use. According to patient and user groups, self-harm as a general catch-all term is preferred, where there is no attempt by clinicians or researchers to restrict by method or intent, but instead to focus on the fact that one has harmed ones