Imperfect Cognitions

This week's post is by Floriane Brunet (Service de pédopsychiatrie, CH de Saint Nazaire) and Christophe Gauld (Service de Psychopathologie du Développement de l’Enfant et de l’Adolescent, Hôpital Femme Mère Enfant – Hospices Civils de Lyon).  Floriane Brunet  Christophe Gauld Today, growing attention is being directed toward self-diagnostic practices among teenagers, a trend that may legitimately be related to the notions of childism and epistemic injustice within adolescent psychiatry. These two notions provide insight into the multiple processes through which adolescents’ testimonies are silenced within Western societies. Becoming aware of this systemic invisibilization of singular adolescent experiences, as well as of the continuum of violence directed toward them, calls for renewed forms of adult engagement. How does this bundle of domination shape the way clinicians listen to adolescents lived experiences? How can the reception of self-diagnostic practices at this ag...

This post is by Lina Lissia. Lina's research focuses on formal epistemology, philosophy of action, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari within the PRIN PNRR project Metaphor and Epistemic Injustice in Mental Illness: The Case of Schizophrenia . In addition to her academic work, she practices as a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lina Lissia Miranda Fricker introduced the concept of hermeneutical injustice , a type of epistemic injustice in which individuals or groups lack the conceptual tools to articulate their experiences. This absence of language prevents recognition and understanding, leaving certain realities invisible. In recent years, this phenomenon has become especially evident in the world of dating, where a surge of neologisms— ghosting , breadcrumbing , orbiting , zombieing , and many more—has emerged as an attempt to give shape to experiences that were previously unrecognized. The rising of dating neol...

This post is by Rabih Chattat . Rabih is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna. He works on psychosocial interventions in dementia and the clinical psychology of ageing. This post was originally published on the EPIC blog on 3rd July 2024. Rabih Chattat Dementia is an umbrella term used to indicate a variety of conditions characterised by neuronal damage. The most prevalent type of dementia is Alzheimer's disease which accounts for around 62% of all types of dementia followed by vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia as the most frequent. Dementia is characterised by a progressive decline in several domains of cognitive abilities such as executive functions, learning and memory, language, perceptual and motor functions, complex attention and social cognition (DSM-5). The duration is up to 12-15 years.  Cognitive decline has an impact on the person’s capacity to retain information and also to recall memories, communicate ...

In this post, Kathleen reports from the 'Experiences of Loss' Conference which took place on the 26th and 27th October 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The conference was organised and ran by Sabrina Coninx (VU Amsterdam). The selection of talks over two days all spoke to the theme of loss in different contexts, addressing self, illness, and memory.  Day 1 Regina Fabry Regina Fabry (Macquarie University): Sharing experiences of loss through self-narration: possibilities and limitations. (online) Regina first clarified the concept of a self-narrative. Individuals might also draw on master narratives, which are widely shared in a socio-cultural community or society. These are value-laden, usually reflecting systems of power and oppression in play. Individuals might push back against these master narratives with alternative narratives, as a form of resistance. In cases of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there is a sense of loss or absence which is very much felt by the...

This is a post by Vaughan Bell and gives a summary of a new pre-printed paper called ‘ De-Rationalising Delusions ’ co-authored with Nichola Raihani and Sam Wilkinson .  Vaughan is an Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at University College London, and also works in the Psychological Interventions Clinic for outpatients with Psychosis (PICuP), in South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Nichola Raihani is a Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London, and Sam Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter University.   Historically, delusions have been understood as pathological beliefs that are characterised by their irrationality. Someone who believes, for example, that a camera has been implanted in their tooth and is taking pictures of their mind, would seem, on face value, to have problems in reasoning rationally about the world. This has motivated researchers to look for problems in domain-general reasoning to e...

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...

PLURAL-MENTE is a new Research Group on the Philosophy and Psychology of Subjectivity and Relationships funded by Marco Castiglioni with the collaboration of Mauro Antonelli and Mario Vergani. In this post they tell us about the aims of the group and give us some information about how to follow their activities. Objectives of the research group The research group “PLURAL-MENTE” promotes in-depth studies about the complex interactions between philosophy and psychology in their different disciplinary branches. It aims to advance philosophic reflection on the various theoretical and applied perspectives inherent in the psychological disciplines, while also examining their historical and cultural roots. The name “PLURAL-MENTE” explicitly recalls the epistemological and methodological pluralism required for the study of psychological phenomena, and promotes a critical engagement with the reductionist positions prevalent today. The subtitle recalls, on the one hand, the centrality of...

Camillia Kong is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent and Research Associate at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. She researches and has published on moral and political philosophical issues around the medico-juridical concept of capacity, mental disorder, and intellectual impairment. Her recent work also examines ethical issues around psychiatric genomics. What should medical and legal professionals do when a person with intellectual impairment chooses to remain within an abusive and disabling environment? Should these professionals even be considering the difference between relationships and care environments which promote or disable the autonomy of individuals with a learning disability or mental disorder? Or is this paternalism gone one step too far? In my new book Mental Capacity in Relationship: Decision-making, dialogue, and autonomy I explore these complex issues through the prism of mental capacity legislation in England and Wales and h...

In this post I am interested in the depiction of mental health issues in books aimed at young children. There are two interesting books addressing the issue of what the depression of a loved one means for the children involved. The first is The Colour Thief , by Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters, illustrated by Karin Littlewood (Wayland 2014). The second is Virginia Wolf , by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault (Kids Can Press 2016).   There are some interesting similarities in how depression is described in the two books. In both books, the point of view is that of a child. In The Colour Thief , a boy observes his father as he gradually falls prey to depression. The father soon gets to the point where he does not go out anymore and stays in bed all day. In Virginia Wolf , a book inspired by the relationship between the author Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa, a child called Vanessa witnesses a curious transformation in her beloved sister Virgina. Virginia becomes, qu...

On 12th September 2016, Zoë Boden and Michael Larkin organised a workshop on Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health at Park House, University of Birmingham. Experts came from psychology, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, mental healthcare professions, and there were also several experts by experience, that is, people with lived experience of mental distress and carers. The workshop was the output of a project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation . The workshop started with a brief introduction by Zoë and Michael who talked about the themes emerging from a previous series of workshop they had run on relatedness. They listed three: Relationships can be either good or bad for mental health Distributed recovery, where recovery is seen as a feature of a system and not of an individual The contract between independence and dependance, and how the latter gets a bad press. Further overlapping themes were pictured in the diagram below, delegates discussed ...

In this post I interview Zoë Boden  (pictured below) on the project she led on ‘Relatedness & Relationships in Mental Health’ which ran from July 2015 to September 2016, funded by the Independent Social Research Fund Flexible Grants for Small Groups. LB: What were you hoping to achieve with the Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health project? Do you think the project was successful?  ZB: This project drew together a range of different disciplinary perspectives to reconsider the role of relationships in the mental health context. We started from the premise that this topic was deceptively simple, and had been overlooked, ignored or denied in much mental health practice, policy and research. Therefore we felt it was ripe for revisiting with an emphasis on both complexity and lived experience. The project led by myself (Psychology, London South Bank University) and Dr Michael Larkin (Psychology, University of Birmingham) brought together a fantastic group o...

How do hope and optimism benefit our relationships? Does optimism predict post-release outcome for the incarcerated? Can I believe what I hope? Are children optimists or realists? Those were just some of the questions discussed at the hope and optimism midterm collaboratory in Estes Park, Colorado. At this interdisciplinary conference, social scientists and philosophers funded by the  Hope and Optimism Funding Initiative  presented their research. While the social science projects are halfway through their research, many philosophy projects are nearing the end. In this report, I will describe only a few projects and talks in more detail. (More information on the individual projects can be found  here .) In their project on optimism in children , Laura Hennefield and Lori Markson are investigating whether young children between three and six years of age are optimistically biased and whether this bias is affected by adverse environmental influences. They have des...

In this post we are providing some information about Mental Health Awareness Week (16-22 May 2016). The Mental Health Foundation has decided to focus on relationships  this year, based on the fact that good relationships are essential for mental health. The foundation invites us to make some new "relationships resolutions": see the details here . Mind, the mental health charity , follows the lead of the Mental Health Foundation, and focuses on the quality of personal relationships: it invites us to look after each other better, by supporting people who might have mental health issues, in the family, among friends, and at work. Rethink Mental Illness encourages people to become involved by hosting a tea party  and read their series of  guest blog posts by people with experience of mental health issues. Michael Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and investigator in PERFECT , has worked extensively on the role of relationsh...

This post is by Michael Larkin , co-investigator for project PERFECT . Michael Larkin I’m a psychologist, and I’m based in the clinical psychology training team at the University of Birmingham. I have a particular interest in phenomenological approaches to psychology, and most of my research involves asking phenomenological questions about various forms of anomalous or distressing experience (how do people make sense of these experiences?), or about the responses of various psychosocial and healthcare services to those experiences (what is it like to receive these interventions?). I’m particularly interested in the relational and cultural context of the answers to both of these questions, and this makes an interesting bridge to the work of PERFECT. From a psychological perspective, PERFECT is interesting because it invites us to see ‘delusions’ (strange beliefs, disproportionate commitments, or ‘factually-erroneous cognitions’) as having some functional value – some epistemic ...