At ICOSR I was delighted by multiple opportunities to converse with active neuroscientists; a general lack of attention to the nuances and complications of phenomenology nevertheless troubled me. The overall impression I walked away with was that certain nosological categories (AVHs for example) have become so thoroughly and invisibly ‘naturalized’ that the vast majority of … Continue reading »
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Post ICOSR: Brief Reflections on ‘First Person” Positioning
I still need to return to my planned posts on anthropological theory of mind and double-bookkeeping, but have been distracted over the past few weeks by an intensive hearing voices training I organized in Chicago followed by the week-long International Congress on Schizophrenia Research (ICOSR) in Orlando. ICOSR was, in fact, tremendous fun overall (time … Continue reading »
Luhrmann: Between Religion and Madness (Part I)
Several thousand feet above the air, I’ve just finished reading two of Tanya Luhrmann’s recent texts: “A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief” and “Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides.” These are scintillating texts and, although Luhrmann presumably did not intend them to perform this particular interdisciplinary function, robust and energizing challenges to contemporary approaches to ‘psychopathology’ within … Continue reading »
Dispatch from the Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial: Part II
[Postscripts:(1) the Saturday AAA ACYIG Plenary--though the difference in tone and focus was certainly notably different from many of the SPA sessions I attended--focused strongly on collaborative work and partnership models. I'm hence now a lot less certain about what or where the problems are when it comes to anthropology's more general relationship to participatory … Continue reading »
Dispatch from the Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial: Part I
I am, right at this moment, approaching the end of day two of the Society for Psychological Anthropology’s 2013 biennial conference. Flying in from Chicago, where the temperature just a few days ago topped out at 38 degrees F, the warmth and humidity here seemed almost overwhelming at first—palm trees everywhere, tropical plants, ‘exotic’ red … Continue reading »
Philosophy & Psychiatry: Just the Facts
As readers know, I’ve been fuming for the last several days about the latest Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology issue–specifically the near total exclusion/marginalization of service users (not to mention women and ethnic racial minorities). I decided to take a look at PPP’s editorial board, and the steering committee of the (overlapping) International Network for Philosophy … Continue reading »
Collaboration and co-optation
I had quite a heated exchange with a visiting scholar yesterday, leading (I’m afraid) to an all-too-disorganized stream of observations, comments and (to be fair to my interlocutor, although I’m honestly not feeling all that generous) cathected intellectual micro-aggressions on my part, regarding academic collaboration and co-optation. Since I was flustered and unclear, I wanted … Continue reading »
more on first person accounts
[Still on the plane.] Yesterday I was talking to a parent of a young adult with psychosis, when, near the end of our conversation, she asked me where she could find a published version of my “story.” (“It would be so powerful…” as I’m often told.) As I’ve indicated many times in the past (here … Continue reading »
