Category Archives: Remembering

Interviews with interrogators

October 21, 2012 – 1:26 pm

Author Dominic Streatfeild interviewed many trained military, intelligence and police interrogators for his book Brainwash and I’ve just realised he’s put the full text of the interviews online. They’re in equal measures fascinating, disturbing and sometimes worryingly relevant, as the ‘war on terror’ still relies on many of the same physical coercion techniques used in […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

Let slip the coins of war

October 20, 2012 – 10:51 am

A fascinating short excerpt from a new study that estimates war and population change in Ancient Rome from finds of stashed coins. It turns out that the coin hoards are a surprisingly good guide to human behaviour: The reasons for this correlation are not hard to fathom. People tend to hide their valuables in times […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

The luxury of hindsight

October 7, 2012 – 10:32 am

“It’s no secret” says the promotional material “that several professional footballers live in Repton Park”, presumably unaware that one of London’s most luxurious housing developments used to be a psychiatric hospital. Repton Park is the new name for what was originally called the London County Lunatic Asylum and was eventually renamed Claybury Hospital before the […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (4)

Growing up in Broadmoor

September 27, 2012 – 8:34 pm

Novelist Patrick McGrath talks about his childhood as the son of a psychiatrist growing up in the grounds of Broadmoor – one of Britain’s highest security psychiatric hospitals – in an article for Intelligent Life. Broadmoor Hospital has a special and undeserved place in the British psyche – stereotyped as ‘the real-life equivalent of Arkham […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Leave a Comment

The inner object

September 23, 2012 – 10:43 am

The Lancet has a wonderful article on how medicine has understood how strange objects have ended up in the body and how this has influenced our understanding of the body and behaviour. The piece notes that cases where people have swallowed or inserted foreign bodies into themselves have been important for surgery and even anatomy […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Leave a Comment

A comment on Szasz

September 16, 2012 – 9:50 am

One of the most interesting commentaries I’ve ever read on Thomas Szasz, the long-time critic of psychiatry who recently passed away, has been left as a comment in the obituary we recently published. The comment is by ‘Aporeticist’ and he or she is clearly a fierce critic of modern psychiatry (to the point of indulging […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (4)

Thomas Szasz has left the building

September 11, 2012 – 8:05 pm

The brilliant, infuriating, persistent, renegade psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has died. Szasz is usually associated with anti-psychiatry but he rejected the label and really had nothing in common with the likes of R.D Laing, David Cooper and the rest. You can see this in his work. He had two main arguments. The first was that the […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (19)

Let there be light, finally

September 7, 2012 – 7:32 pm

A documentary on the trauma of war, banned by the US government for more than 30 years, has found its way onto YouTube as a freely viewable video. During World War Two, legendary director John Huston, then a fresh face in Hollywood, was commissioned to make three propaganda films for the US Army. The third […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (10)

The kings of Kingsley Hall

September 2, 2012 – 12:13 pm

The Observer has an article on some of the residents of R.D. Laing’s chaos-as-therapy residential centre at Kingsley Hall, five decades on. The idea was that people with psychosis and therapists would live together in a therapeutic environment and effect change without the use of medical drugs. Residents could ‘live out’ their delusions and come […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

A traditional IRA welcome to the sociologist

August 27, 2012 – 10:11 pm

An amazing description of how sociologists who wanted to do field studies in Belfast during the height of The Troubles were put through some seemingly routine but terrifying vetting by the IRA to check they were up to the job. The piece is from an article by Lorraine Dowler, who starts by recounting a tale […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

A dark and complex past

August 27, 2012 – 8:16 am

In a story that could be the plot for a film, one of the world’s pioneering anthropologists has been found to have been a member of both the Nazi SS and the French resistance during the Second World War. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff retains legendary status in anthropology and particularly in Colombia, where he first lived with […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Comments (13)

Consciousness after decapitation

August 21, 2012 – 5:53 am

How long is a severed head conscious for? The question has troubled students of the human body for centuries and generated countless, possibly mythical stories. History of medicine blog The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice has finally looked through the records to find out which of the accounts are based in blood-curdling fact. A common tale involves someone […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (7)

A very modern trauma

August 11, 2012 – 12:42 pm

Posttraumatic stress disorder is one of the defining disorders of modern psychiatry. Although first officially accepted as a diagnosis in the early 1980s, many believe that it has always been with us, but two new studies suggest that this unlikely to be the case – it may be a genuinely modern reaction to trauma. The […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (26)

Projecting Nabokov

July 7, 2012 – 11:23 pm

American Scholar has an excellent article on the use of psychology in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov – most famous as the author of Lolita. As is now standard for literary criticism the article includes lots of florid prose and a spurious reference to ‘mirror neurons‘, but get past the flouncing and it’s a brilliant […]

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One hundred years of gratitude

June 22, 2012 – 2:19 pm

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of Alan Turing – brilliant mathematician, philosopher, proto-cognitive scientist, secret war hero and unjustly persecuted gay man. If you want some excellent coverage of his life, work and influence, Wired UK has a new collection of articles stemming from their Turing Week project. Highly recommended.   Link to Turing Week […]

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The making of ‘War Neuroses’

June 20, 2012 – 3:18 pm

The history of one of the most important and disturbing films in the history of psychiatry is covered by an excellent article in the latest edition of the Journal of the History of Medicine. The piece concerns the 1917 film of soldiers affected by ‘shell shock’ during World War One. It was called ‘War Neuroses’ […]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment
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