Monday 29 September 2014
Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us
Just a few weeks ago we posted a clip of Paul Verhaeghe's TED talk. Today he has an article in the Guardian: gu.com/p/42v9g/tw
Friday 26 September 2014
On the overdiagnosis of mental illness
Allen J. Frances headed the DSM IV taks force. In retrospect, he is unhappy about his work on the DSM and he is very critical of DSM 5.
In this 2012 lecture, Diagnostic Inflation: Does Everyone Have a Mental Illness?, he outlines why he thinks the DSM 5 will lead to millions of people being mislabeled with mental disorders.
Here's a sequence of the lecture:
Check out the complete lecture on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuCwVnzSjWA
In this 2012 lecture, Diagnostic Inflation: Does Everyone Have a Mental Illness?, he outlines why he thinks the DSM 5 will lead to millions of people being mislabeled with mental disorders.
Here's a sequence of the lecture:
Check out the complete lecture on You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuCwVnzSjWA
Monday 22 September 2014
Towards a dialogue with extra-terrestials
Pioneer 10 (1972) and Pioneer 11 (1973) were the first spacecrafts programmed to leave the Solar System. Astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake have designed two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the spacecrafts. These plaques feature a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 would be intercepted by extraterrestrial life. .
This is a picture of the plaque:
The plaque was intended to open a dialogue with extra-terrestrial life, showing a schematic representation of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen, the relative position of sun within the galaxy, the solar system, and two human figures: a man and a woman. Notice the raised hand of the man. It was meant the represent a sign of good will, but of course we don't know what raised extremities might mean to aliens.
It is interesting that there has been controversy about the nudity of the man and woman figures on the plaque. Therefore silhouettes of a man and a woman, rather than the photograph that was initially planned, were included on the golden record that was send with the Voyagers (1977).
This is a picture of the plaque:
The plaque was intended to open a dialogue with extra-terrestrial life, showing a schematic representation of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen, the relative position of sun within the galaxy, the solar system, and two human figures: a man and a woman. Notice the raised hand of the man. It was meant the represent a sign of good will, but of course we don't know what raised extremities might mean to aliens.
It is interesting that there has been controversy about the nudity of the man and woman figures on the plaque. Therefore silhouettes of a man and a woman, rather than the photograph that was initially planned, were included on the golden record that was send with the Voyagers (1977).
Saturday 20 September 2014
A history of everything, including you
A History of Everything, Including You is a fascinating short story written by Jenny Hollowell. It was published in the book New Sudden Fiction: Short Stories From America and Beyond.
Here you can listen to the story, read by the author (from an episode of the podcast Radiolab).
Here you can listen to the story, read by the author (from an episode of the podcast Radiolab).
Thursday 18 September 2014
Short term 12
I know it did not get rave reviews, but I love this movie about a youth care facility.
I think it is a great movie, if only for the respectful way in which young people in trouble are depicted.
Like in this scene: Marcus has been caught hiding drugs in his matras. Grace tries to talk with him. He doesn't say much, but Grace begins to realize that Marcus, who will turn 18 soon, is afraid to leave the facility.
Upon Grace's suggestion, Mason is going to talk to him.
Mason listens to Marcus' rap in which for the first time he expresses something about what he can not talk about.
I think it is a great movie, if only for the respectful way in which young people in trouble are depicted.
Like in this scene: Marcus has been caught hiding drugs in his matras. Grace tries to talk with him. He doesn't say much, but Grace begins to realize that Marcus, who will turn 18 soon, is afraid to leave the facility.
Upon Grace's suggestion, Mason is going to talk to him.
Mason listens to Marcus' rap in which for the first time he expresses something about what he can not talk about.
Sunday 14 September 2014
Talking about secrets
Talking about secrets in the summerschool this might interest you
http://ideas.ted.com/2014/07/09/the-art-and-science-of-sharing-a-secret/
Justine
http://ideas.ted.com/2014/07/09/the-art-and-science-of-sharing-a-secret/
Justine
Saturday 13 September 2014
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Wednesday 10 September 2014
Time has come in mental health services – humanistic approaches are possible
On 1st of September I was invited to have a
speech in a seminar in Helsinki. The subject was Mental health and Medicalization. Out of us three having the speech the main
lecture was given by Peter Goetsche, a Danish doctor, who is the director of
the Nordic Cochrane center. Last year he published the book “Deadline medicine
and organized crime”. His message in his speech was clear, even if
a bit scary: The Evidence Based recommendations
for treatment of depression are based on research that is done by fraud.
Pharmaceutical industry has strongly affected the research by financing it and
by selecting only those studies to be published that show favorable results for
antidepressive medication. But even worse: In many studies the design has been
manipulated and if this is not enough, the results of the studies could have
been changed. Myself being a researcher
also, all this information was awkward and disgusting.
I have had critical comments on the research design in randomized
clinical trials, because e.g. in medication research there are many basic
problems in the studies: The follow-up period is usually very short, between 6
to 8 weeks if compared medication to non-medication. During this period some rapid changes will occur,
but it does not tell of the long term outcome that actually in many studies has
been shown to change in the way that the advantage of the medicine treatment is
no longer visible at 1 year follow-up. The second basic problem in the design
is that comparing group means actually do not tell anything about the single
clients and their response to the studied method. Statistically significant
difference may occur already even if only less than 30% of the participants in
the treatment group go over the variation of the results within the control
group. So actually 70 % of participants in both groups may have the same
results and still because of the statistical difference the conclusion is made that
all patients should have the treatment, e.g. antidepressive medication. This is
use of power that is manipulated by the research design.
Peter Goetsche’s message has caused a lot of discussion. His comments come out at the same time when
convincing evidence has emerged that both neuroleptic medication in psychosis
and antidepressive medication are related to brain changes. Neuroleptic medication
has been shown to be related with shrinking of the brain. More openness has emerged to come back to more
humanistic and psychotherapeutically orientated treatment in most severe mental
health problems. We are living a momentum, an important period of time, in
which the field is open to receive good practices. But this does not happen by
itself, but all of us who have the interest of more human services should be
active in our context to introduce new ideas of dialogical practice, to
organize education of the new practices and also to by research document the
advantages of the new practice.
Jaakko Seikkula
Monday 8 September 2014
Loves: an emerging collage of stories about psychotherapy, love and loss
Besides this blog on dialogical practices, there's another blog that might be of interest to some of you: http://peterrober.blogspot.be/
It is an emerging collage of stories about psychotherapy, love and loss.
Every week new stories are added.
The whole collage of stories can be found below the new stories....
I'm not sure where this collage is going...
but it is definitely going somewhere...
It is an emerging collage of stories about psychotherapy, love and loss.
Every week new stories are added.
The whole collage of stories can be found below the new stories....
I'm not sure where this collage is going...
but it is definitely going somewhere...
Towards a society of solidarity and autonomy...
This is a TED talk of the Belgian Lacanian psycholanalyst Paul Verhaeghe.
Verhaeghe has become an influential thinker in the low countries. Politicians read his books and listen to his words.
In this talk he uses hedgehogs as metaphors for human beings. A hedgehog needs connection with other hedgehogs, but being too close hurts. So oscillating between too close and too far hedgehogs are always in search of the right distance.
His ideas orient us towards a less individualist and a less anxious future.
Verhaeghe has become an influential thinker in the low countries. Politicians read his books and listen to his words.
In this talk he uses hedgehogs as metaphors for human beings. A hedgehog needs connection with other hedgehogs, but being too close hurts. So oscillating between too close and too far hedgehogs are always in search of the right distance.
His ideas orient us towards a less individualist and a less anxious future.
Thursday 4 September 2014
Dimensions of Dialogue (Jan Švankmajer)
This is an interesting clip.
It is part 2 of the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's short film "Dimensions of dialogue".
It is part 2 of the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's short film "Dimensions of dialogue".
More information about this short film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensions_of_Dialogue
Tip: Watch this clip with your students and have an enriching discussion on the meaning of dialogue...
Attunement and the need for an ‘intra-ontology”
Rather than as external agents wholly in control of the unfolding processes of importance to us, we need to see ourselves as being internally related to still-in-process, flowing ‘worlds’ of intermingling activities, activities which influence us as much, if not more, than we can influence them. We are not just in the world, but of it - we are a living part of it, within it.
Thus, clearly, our bodies are not just passive recipients of stimuli from an external world 'over-there'. Rather, they are (or can be) attuned to the world. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, even in the case of a minor reflex action, an organism’s perception is meaningful in the sense that “reflex actions are never themselves blind processes: they adjust themselves to a 'direction' of the situation, and express our orientation towards a 'behavioural setting', just as much as the action of the 'geographical setting' on us” (p. 79) - the relation is not just a mechanical, cause-and effect one..
Consequently, there are two kinds of difficulty that we can face in life, not just one: there are 1) difficulties of the intellect and 2) difficulties of orientation or ways of relating: 1) We can formulate difficulties of the intellect as problems which, with the aid of clever theories, we can solve by the use of a ‘manipulational’ form of reasoning, making use of inner mental representations which we take as corresponding to an outer reality. 2) Difficulties of orientation or attunement, however, are of a quite different kind, for they are to do with how we relate ourselves bodily towards events occurring around us, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for these are the ways that determine, that ‘give shape to’, the lines of action we resolve on as appropriate to the situations we find ourselves to be in.
Indeed, to go further, it is only from within an achieved orientation shared by all within a social group that we all, as members of that group, can each, individually, pick out the things we need to attend to in our surroundings, and each make our own contribution to the solving of a problem understood in common by all in the group.
Attunement, or the idea of an orientation within a setting, or of a way of relating ourselves to our surroundings, is in fact a pervasive biological phenomenon, common to both human and non-human organisms in their responsive, living relations to/with their environment.
For example, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) again points out: “when an insect's leg is severed, it substitutes it with a free one; however, no such substitution occurs when the leg is tied to another because the tied leg continues to count in the insect's scheme of things, and because the current of activity which flows toward the world still passes through it” (p.78).
Vygotsky (1929) makes a similar comment with regard to the handicapped child: “The positive uniqueness of the handicapped child is created not by the failure of one or another function observed in a normal child but by the new formations caused by this lapse. This uniquely individual reaction to a defect represents a continually evolving adaptive process. If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means. And, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course, along which he must lead the child. The key to originality transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation” (in The Fundamental Problems of Defectology, p.2).
Kurt Goldstein (1995/1933) too notes: “We have become so accustomed to regard symptoms as direct expressions of the damage in a part of the nervous system that we tend to assume that, corresponding to some given damage, definite symptoms must inevitably appear. We do so because we forget that normal as well as abnormal reactions (“ symptoms ") are only expressions of the organism's attempt to deal with certain demands of the environment.... Symptoms are answers, given by the modified organism to definite demands: they are attempted solutions to problems derived on the one hand from the demands of the natural environment and on the other from the special tasks imposed on the organism in the course of the examination” (p.35).
Our attunement or orientation toward the others and othernesses around us is reciprocated by their actions on us — we occupy what elsewhere I have called “agential spaces” (Shotter, 2013). Even our physical surroundings are not just ‘there’, awaiting our intentions to act upon them; they ‘call for’ certain actions from us. For instance, a Parkinson’s patient finds it very difficult to take a step on a flat floor, but can walk down stairs (and across illusory stairs) with fluency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc-8gzTDD5I).
In other words, we are seeing/experiencing here circumstances where people/organisms are acting in terms of the meaning of their surroundings to them. This, it seems to me, is what von Uexkull was trying to capture in his notion of a person’s/organism’s Umwelt — which is not the ‘mere’ environment an outsider might observe but the environment as perceived and experienced by the organism itself. 'Entering-into' strange 'ways of being in the world' would be the task of an intra-ontology.
Thus, clearly, our bodies are not just passive recipients of stimuli from an external world 'over-there'. Rather, they are (or can be) attuned to the world. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, even in the case of a minor reflex action, an organism’s perception is meaningful in the sense that “reflex actions are never themselves blind processes: they adjust themselves to a 'direction' of the situation, and express our orientation towards a 'behavioural setting', just as much as the action of the 'geographical setting' on us” (p. 79) - the relation is not just a mechanical, cause-and effect one..
Consequently, there are two kinds of difficulty that we can face in life, not just one: there are 1) difficulties of the intellect and 2) difficulties of orientation or ways of relating: 1) We can formulate difficulties of the intellect as problems which, with the aid of clever theories, we can solve by the use of a ‘manipulational’ form of reasoning, making use of inner mental representations which we take as corresponding to an outer reality. 2) Difficulties of orientation or attunement, however, are of a quite different kind, for they are to do with how we relate ourselves bodily towards events occurring around us, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for these are the ways that determine, that ‘give shape to’, the lines of action we resolve on as appropriate to the situations we find ourselves to be in.
Indeed, to go further, it is only from within an achieved orientation shared by all within a social group that we all, as members of that group, can each, individually, pick out the things we need to attend to in our surroundings, and each make our own contribution to the solving of a problem understood in common by all in the group.
Attunement, or the idea of an orientation within a setting, or of a way of relating ourselves to our surroundings, is in fact a pervasive biological phenomenon, common to both human and non-human organisms in their responsive, living relations to/with their environment.
For example, as Merleau-Ponty (1962) again points out: “when an insect's leg is severed, it substitutes it with a free one; however, no such substitution occurs when the leg is tied to another because the tied leg continues to count in the insect's scheme of things, and because the current of activity which flows toward the world still passes through it” (p.78).
Vygotsky (1929) makes a similar comment with regard to the handicapped child: “The positive uniqueness of the handicapped child is created not by the failure of one or another function observed in a normal child but by the new formations caused by this lapse. This uniquely individual reaction to a defect represents a continually evolving adaptive process. If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means. And, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course, along which he must lead the child. The key to originality transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation” (in The Fundamental Problems of Defectology, p.2).
Kurt Goldstein (1995/1933) too notes: “We have become so accustomed to regard symptoms as direct expressions of the damage in a part of the nervous system that we tend to assume that, corresponding to some given damage, definite symptoms must inevitably appear. We do so because we forget that normal as well as abnormal reactions (“ symptoms ") are only expressions of the organism's attempt to deal with certain demands of the environment.... Symptoms are answers, given by the modified organism to definite demands: they are attempted solutions to problems derived on the one hand from the demands of the natural environment and on the other from the special tasks imposed on the organism in the course of the examination” (p.35).
Our attunement or orientation toward the others and othernesses around us is reciprocated by their actions on us — we occupy what elsewhere I have called “agential spaces” (Shotter, 2013). Even our physical surroundings are not just ‘there’, awaiting our intentions to act upon them; they ‘call for’ certain actions from us. For instance, a Parkinson’s patient finds it very difficult to take a step on a flat floor, but can walk down stairs (and across illusory stairs) with fluency (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc-8gzTDD5I).
In other words, we are seeing/experiencing here circumstances where people/organisms are acting in terms of the meaning of their surroundings to them. This, it seems to me, is what von Uexkull was trying to capture in his notion of a person’s/organism’s Umwelt — which is not the ‘mere’ environment an outsider might observe but the environment as perceived and experienced by the organism itself. 'Entering-into' strange 'ways of being in the world' would be the task of an intra-ontology.
Tuesday 2 September 2014
You can fuck with the customers... but you have to watch your language
This clip was made as a trailer for the re-make of the motion picture Carrie in 2013.
What is interesting for me is how the makers of this clips fuck with the customers (their own words), but censor the word "fuck" several times.
You can do it, but you have to watch your language.
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