Category Archives: Togetherness

Disaster response psychology needs to change

May 12, 2013 – 10:54 am

I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about how disaster response mental health services are often based on the erroneous assumption that everyone needs ‘treatment’ and often rely on single-session counselling sessions which may do more harm than good. Unfortunately, the article has been given a rather misleading headline (‘Minds traumatised by disaster heal themselves […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

Deeper into genetic challenges to psychiatric diagnosis

April 24, 2013 – 9:45 am

For my recent Observer article I discussed how genetic findings are providing some of the best evidence that psychiatric diagnoses do not represent discrete disorders. As part of that I spoke to Michael Owen, a psychiatrist and researcher based at Cardiff University, who has been leading lots of the rethink on the nature of psychiatric […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (7)

Like a part of me is missing

April 18, 2013 – 8:06 pm

Matter magazine has an amazing article about the world of underground surgery for healthy people who feel that their limb is not part of their body and needs to be removed. The condition is diagnosed as body integrity identity disorder or BIID but it has a whole range of interests and behaviours associated with it […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

Amid the borderlands

April 7, 2013 – 10:00 am

I’ve got an article in The Observer on how some of the best evidence against the idea that psychiatric diagnoses like ‘schizophrenia’ describe discrete ‘diseases’ comes not from the critics of psychiatry, but from medical genetics. I found this a fascinating outcome because it puts both sides of the polarised ‘psychiatry divide’ in quite an […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (8)

The history of the birth of neuroculture

March 9, 2013 – 8:35 pm

My recent Observer piece examined how neuroscience has saturated popular culture but the story of how we found ourselves living in a ‘neuroculture’ is itself quite fascinating. Everyday brain concepts have bubbled up from their scientific roots and integrated themselves into popular consciousness over several decades. Neuroscience itself is actually quite new. Although the brain, […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (3)

A fine art

March 1, 2013 – 12:25 am

It’s not often you get to enrage both feminists and misogynists at the same time but a new study, just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, may have managed this impressive feat. It found that men’s preference for larger breasts was associated with having a greater number of oppressive beliefs about women. Feminists can […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (12)

Your future self already exists in the cloud

February 27, 2013 – 9:16 am

The Economist has a short but fascinating piece on the work of physicist Chaoming Song who creates mathematical models to predict your future location based on your mobile phone and online activity. His accuracy rarely drops below 80%. Song Chaoming, for instance, is a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a physicist, but […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

The Perfect Woman

February 25, 2013 – 7:41 pm

The heaving busts and melodrama of a Latin American soap opera, a television industry desperate for a ratings hit, and the writer makes a woman with Asperger’s syndrome the love interest for the dashing plastic surgeon in the latest telenovela. It sounds like a recipe for disaster but it turned out to be a triumph. […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

Khat out of the bag

February 17, 2013 – 10:49 am

Finding myself at a loose end yesterday I decided I’d try and track down one of London’s mafrishes – a type of cafe where people from the capital’s Ethiopian, Somali and Yemeni community chew the psychoactive plant khat. I’d heard about a Somali cafe on Lewisham Way and thought that was as good a place […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (12)

An online sickness

February 14, 2013 – 10:32 pm

The first academic review article on ‘Munchausen by Internet‘ – where people fake the identity of an ill person online – has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Munchausen syndrome is a common name for facticious disorder where people consciously fake illnesses for their own gain. This is distinguished from malingering […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

Hallucinations of the inner body

February 10, 2013 – 10:00 am

One of the least understood symptoms in psychosis are hallucinations called cenesthesias. These are ‘inner body’ feelings that often don’t correspond to any known or even possible bodily experiences. A team from Japan has just published a study of patients who experience cenesthesias in the mouth. Here are a selection of the hallucinations: “Feels like […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (11)

Emotions are included

February 1, 2013 – 11:18 pm

New Republic has an interesting piece on how corporations enforce ‘emotional labour’ in their workforce – checking that they are being sufficiently passionate about their work and caring to their customers. It focuses on the UK sandwich chain Pret who send a mystery shopper to each outlet weekly and “If the employee who rings up […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (11)

Culture of the digital playground

January 30, 2013 – 10:45 am

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has spent several years researching hacker culture, hanging out with coders, geeks and cypherpunks to understand the beliefs and boundaries of the community they inhabit. If you want a flavour of what Coleman has been working on her interview in Wired is a good place to start but the best place to […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

In the middle of a conflict

January 29, 2013 – 11:17 pm

One of the things I quickly discovered while working for Médecins Sans Frontières in Colombia, was that while there is lots of research on people who have experienced armed conflict in the past, there was very little information on the mental health of people living in active conflict zones. With MSF colleagues, we’ve just published […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (1)

Back to the old school

January 21, 2013 – 9:58 pm

New York Magazine has a fantastic article on the psychological impact of high school and how it affects you through your adult life. It’s a fascinating subject because so much of developmental psychology has focused on childhood and yet our adolescent school years are probably the most formative for our view of the social world. […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

Intoxicating tendencies

January 1, 2013 – 5:55 pm

The latest edition of BBC Radio 4′s Thinking Allowed is a special on ‘intoxication’ looking at the uses, abuses and social function of drugs through the ages. It’s a fascinating programme in itself but it is peppered with vivid excerpts from how drugs, altered states and drug users have been described historically and are discussed […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (7)
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,610 other followers