Category Archives: Togetherness

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 Remembering | Leave a Comment

Schizophrenia beyond the brain

September 20, 2012 – 8:52 pm

The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent article about the rebirth of interest in how social experiences affect the development of schizophrenia. It’s written by the brilliant anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann, who tracks how the enthusiasm for a completely neurobiological explanation for the disorder has now begun to wane. It’s worth saying that this extreme neurobiological […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (3)

Avoiding the shadows

September 16, 2012 – 12:10 pm

The Lancet has a powerful essay on children born from rape and the social and psychological consequences for mother, child and community. I’ll let the article speak for itself as it carefully articulates how the relationship between mother and child can be affected by these tragic events. There is one point worth highlighting, however. The […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (1)

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 Remembering, Theory | Comments (4)

Unwritten rules of the road

September 15, 2012 – 10:30 pm

The latest edition of The Psychologist has a fantastic discussion on the psychology of how drivers, cyclists and pedestrians interact. Rather appropriately, it’s with psychologist Ian Walker, who makes lots of interesting points about how different road users are perceived and how that affects behaviour. …the lack of understanding of the cyclist outgroup seems to […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

Hallucinations caused by lightning

September 12, 2012 – 9:47 pm

A 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by a lightning bolt and awoke in hospital to find herself experiencing bizarre hallucinations. The case, reported in BMJ Case Reports, describes how the healthy young woman was mountaineering with her climbing partner when they heard heard cracking thunder and were thrown to the ground by a massive shockwave. […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Seeing | Comments (5)

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 Remembering | Comments (10)

Animals conscious say leading neuroscientists

August 20, 2012 – 9:01 pm

A group of leading neuroscientists has used a conference at Cambridge University to make an official declaration recognising consciousness in animals. The declaration was made at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference and signed by some of the leading lights in consciousness research, including Christof Koch and David Edelman. You can read the full text as […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (23)

A country on the couch

August 19, 2012 – 1:09 pm

The New York Times discusses Argentina’s love affair with psychoanalysis. A country that has more psychologists – the majority Freudian – than any other nation on Earth. Argentina is genuinely unique with regard to psychology. Even in Latin America, where Freudian ideas remain relatively strong, Argentina remains a stronghold of the undiluted classic schools of […]

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

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 Remembering, Theory | Comments (26)

The science and politics of mind-altering drugs

August 11, 2012 – 8:24 am

The Guardian Science Podcast has an interview with neuroscientist David Nutt on the science and politics of mind-altering substances and it’s possibly one of the most sensible discussions of drugs and drug harms you are likely to hear in a long time. Prof Nutt is quite well known in the UK – largely due to […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (3)

Sexism affects robots

August 7, 2012 – 8:23 pm

The Journal of Applied Social Psychology has just pubished a study that is both bizarre and profound. It reports on two experiments that show gender stereotyping extends to robots. (S)he’s Got the Look: Gender Stereotyping of Robots F. Eyssel and F. Hegel Journal of Applied Social Psychology Previous research on gender effects in robots has […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (11)

Psychosis and the fog of reality

August 5, 2012 – 8:26 am

Last May The New Yorker had a beautiful but paywalled article on on psychosis and insight. Thankfully the full text has found its way online as a pdf. Psychosis is the psychiatric term for delusions and hallucinations, with insight being the ability to recognise that what you believe or experience is not a fair representation […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (9)

Hallucinating body flowers

July 28, 2012 – 2:56 pm

A curious and kaleidoscopic case of hallucinations reported in the latest journal Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria: A 95-year-old woman, with four years of schooling, had a seven-year history of DI [delusional infestation]. In the beginning, there were itching and prickling sensations on arms and head. Subsequently, she felt small worms, with different shapes and colors, crawling […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Seeing | Comments (1)

Is mental health a smoke screen for society’s ills?

July 23, 2012 – 9:08 pm

Somatosphere has a fantastic account of the debates rocking the world of global mental health – the still nascent field that aims to make mental health a world priority. The idea itself is sound in the general sense, but there is still a lot of argument about what it means to promote mental health and […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (12)

A Bigger Apple

June 17, 2012 – 9:57 am

The Open University’s blog has a fascinating piece on why New York City has seen an astonishing drop in crime, against the predictions of most social theories. Twenty years ago most criminologists and sociologists would have doubted that a metropolis could reduce this kind of crime by so much. Although the scale of New York […]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment
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