Category Archives: Togetherness

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 […]

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Gene environment interaction of your neighbourhood

June 12, 2012 – 3:37 pm

The amount genes and the environment contribute to our behaviour varies across the country and a new study has mapped exactly where the differences lie. As well as an interesting finding in itself, the study also highlights an important but often misunderstood point about heritability. The map on the right is from the study, and […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

Behavioural profiling in casinos

June 11, 2012 – 6:51 pm

Online culture magazine limn has an amazing article on the use of high-tech behavioural profiling in casinos that lets the house target its gaming to where it cashes in most. Due to the fact that most games are now networked and most punters have been persuaded to play by a swipe card that can be […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

A delusional life on film

June 3, 2012 – 3:51 pm

A curiously recursive case of psychosis, reported in the latest issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, about a person who worked on a reality TV show who had the delusion that they were on a reality TV show. Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (3)

An unplanned post-mortem

June 1, 2012 – 1:02 pm

My latest Beyond Boundaries column for The Psychologist explores the space between he we study suicide and the experience of families affected by it: Suicide is often considered a silencing, but for many it is only the beginning of the conversation. A common approach to understand those who have ended their own lives is the […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (2)

The bathroom of the mind

June 1, 2012 – 12:15 pm

The latest issue of The Psychologist has hit the shelves and it has a freely available and suprisingly thought-provoking article about bathroom psychology. If you’re thinking it’s an excuse for cheap jokes you’d be mistaken as takes a genuine and inquisitive look at why so little psychology, Freud excepted, has been concerned with one of […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Graffiti, Theory | Comments (5)

What is the DSM supposed to do?

May 22, 2012 – 4:57 pm

I’ve written an article for the Discover Magazine’s blog The Crux on what the DSM diagnostic manual is supposed to do. This is quite an interesting question when you think about it. In other words, it asks – how do we define mental illness – both in theory and in practice? The article tackles how […]

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

Sigman and the skewed screen of death

May 22, 2012 – 9:23 am

The media is buzzing this morning with the shocking news that children spend ‘more than six hours in front of screens’. The news is shocking, however, because it’s wrong. The sound bite stems from an upcoming talk on ‘Alcohol and electronic media: units of consumption’ by evidence-ambivalent psychologist Aric Sigman who is doing a guest […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (4)

Uploaded to the Life network

May 19, 2012 – 2:21 pm

A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”. The piece is by futurist Tom Scott who obviously sees the consciousness uploading business far more pessimistically than me. Personally, I’m going to get uploaded to a […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (2)

A history of human sacrifice

May 18, 2012 – 12:19 pm

A video on the history of human sacrifice is available from Science magazine as part of their special issue on human conflict. Sadly, all the articles are locked behind a paywall but the video is free to view and has science writer Ann Gibbons discussing how the practice evolved through the ages and how archaeologists […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (2)

She’s lost control

May 15, 2012 – 12:38 pm

An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on […]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Inside the Brain | Comments (21)

A look inside digital humanity

May 11, 2012 – 12:25 pm

BBC Radio 4 has just started an excellent series called The Digital Human that looks at how we use technology and how it affects our relationship to the social world. It’s written and presented by psychologist Aleks Krotoski and the first two episodes are already online. The first discusses the tendency to capture and display […]

By vaughanbell | Comments (9)

Sex survey a let down in bed

May 9, 2012 – 8:27 pm

A ‘saucy sex survey’ has been doing the rounds in the media that claims to be one of the largest studies on the sex lives of UK citizens. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit of a let down in bed. The study has been carried out by an unholy alliance between one of the […]

By vaughanbell | Leave a Comment
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