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Today's post is by Joseph Houlders, doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. In this post, he reports on the book launch for the new Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology . The event took place on 22 July 2019, and was chaired by one of the editors of the handbook, Professor Matthew Broome, Director of the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham. Five contributors to the handbook spoke at the launch: Professor Christoph Hoerl, Understanding, explaining and the concept of psychic illness   Dr Clara Humpston, Thoughts without thinkers: The paradox of thought insertion   Professor Femi Oyebode, Consciousness and its Disorders  Dr Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Phenomenology and Psychiatric Classification Dr Gareth Owen, Psychopathology and Law: what does phenomenology have to offer?  The launch began with an apt question: to what extent can we understand and explain psychic illness? The central theme of the afternoon was how phen...

A month from the end of project PERFECT, Michael Larkin (Co-Investigator) and Valeria Motta (Doctoral Research Fellow) reflect on what the project meant for them. One helpful way to think about being involved in a project as expansive as PERFECT is to reflect on where it is sending you next. In this post, we discuss some of the things they have learned from our interdisciplinary work together. Michael Larkin Michael : One of the most interesting aspects of PERFECT for me has arisen from the opportunity to work with you on your PhD. It’s going to be a really innovative combination of philosophical argument and phenomenological-psychological investigation. I’m aware that – coming into it – you were already very well-read on the phenomenological philosophy. I’m curious to know what has struck you most about getting to grips with qualitative methods in psychology? Valeria Motta Valeria : Thank you Michael. It was very interesting for me working with you too. I was surprised to find a varie...

Today's post is by Michael Larkin and William Day (both at the University of Aston). They are reporting on the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships conference, which was sponsored by project PERFECT and held at the University of Aston on 22-23 May 2019. We're both participants in the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships group at Aston University. In planning our inaugural  conference , the group initially considered a narrower focus on Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There is a regular (more-or-less annual) IPA Conference, and we had agreed to host it. Eventually we settled on a broader theme (Creativity and Affect). IPA is one approach which many of us use in our work, but it is not the only one, and methods are not the sole focus of our meetings. When we meet as a group, we do discuss creative innovations in methodology, but we also read phenomenology, and explore studies which offer experiential insights on health and relationships. We hoped tha...

The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network organized a workshop last June 20th at the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. The theme was Phenomenology and Qualitative Health Research. The aim of the workshop was to explore different ways in which philosophical phenomenology is applied in qualitative research and address issues that arise from the increasingly collaborative nature of these fields. The organizers were Anthony Fernandez , Marcin Moskalewicz and Dan Zahavi . I was very glad to be included among the speakers and have the chance to present some of my work. This report includes a detailed summary of everyone’s talks. I thank everyone for sharing their notes to make this report. The first talk was Applied Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (University of Copenhaghen and University of Oxford) Zahavi addressed some fundam...

This post is written by Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm. Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has published widely in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, and medical ethics. Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She has published widely in philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of medicine and psychiatry. In this post,  Şerife Tekin and Robyn Bluhm present their new edited volume "The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry". Although there has long been a close link between philosophy and psychiatry, it is only in the past few decades that philosophy of psychiatry has emerged as a field in its own right, with its specific set of questions and themes generating interest from both traditional philosophers, and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists, psychologis...

Today's post is by Huw Green. Green is a psychologist who recently moved back to the UK after finishing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a clinical postdoctoral fellowship at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program at Mt Sinai Hospital New York. He is currently full time dad to a toddler and new baby while waiting to become HCPC registered and start clinical work . Various scholars have suggested that psychiatric disorders vary across time, especially in terms of their phenomenology. In a recent paper  appeared in the  Psychiatric Bulletin I offer an account of how this sort of change might come about. I start with the suggestion that changes in psychiatric terminology through history – and in particular the shift toward more homogenous descriptions of psychotic symptoms in formal documents like the DSM – have had an impact on the very experiences that terminology tries to describe. This is not my suggestion; it...

Rolf Hvidtfeldt  is postdoctoral fellow at the  Humanomics Research Centre  at Aalborg University in Denmark. His research is mainly focused on the philosophies of science evaluation, scientific communication, and conflicts of perspective. Currently he is working on a  project  focused on mapping the various ways in which research (in a broad sense) affects (in a broad sense) society at large. He has recently published the book The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science in which he seeks to develop a method for examining epistemic aspects of interdisciplinary collaborations. The following blogpost briefly summarises key elements of ch. 8 of this book, which is a case study picked from schizophrenia research. In the The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science I develop a method, approach-based analysis, for studying interdisciplinary science in deep detail. Chapter 8 of the book is a case study in which this method is applied to a case of interdisciplinary resear...