Content warning: suicidal ideation
Last Wednesday was the day I learned to always carry a paperclip in my pocket.
We were laying in the soft green grass watching puffy clouds in the sky when my eight-year-old son threatened to jump from my bedroom window. He described how breaking glass would slice his neck and then kill him when he landed, …
The narrative around eating disorders is shifting. Researchers and activists have advanced a more complex understanding of eating disorders by presenting cutting-edge scientific and clinical research (increasingly incorporating insights from genetics and neuroscience) insisting on the importance of listening to and representing the experiences of marginalized groups. The concept of complexity, which can be defined as the state of having …
If you spend any time in a psychiatric hospital in China, you will likely be struck by the fact that most of the inpatients there have been hospitalized against or regardless of their will, usually by their family members. In China, although families have long been involved in the lives of mentally ill patients, the ways in which they are …
A Workshop Report by the Neuroscience and Society Network
The Neuroscience and Society Network organised a workshop on 11-12 July 2018 at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London (KCL) titled “The Mercurial Life Of Drugs: Psychedelics As Models, Risk Factors, And Treatments For Mental Disorders”. In the workshop, we explored what makes psychedelic …
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterised by intrusive anxiety-provoking thoughts (obsessions) and rituals aimed at reducing anxiety, which then paradoxically come to exacerbate it (compulsions). I have been studying clinicians working with people who suffer from a severe, …
Warm haze
As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to each other to discuss something beyond my grasp. I had aphasia and my incoherent stream of words was puzzling to the people around me. I spoke, I thought, in perfect sentences but …