When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …
Tag Archives: Psychosis
Expanding borders in psychiatry: embedded reporting from the 8th International Conference on Early Psychosis
San Francisco October 2012
You may have followed the debates and controversies surrounding the upcoming release of the DSM-V and in particular the proposal to include “attenuated psychosis syndrome” as a diagnostic category. The DSM-V committee originally proposed including attenuated psychosis syndrome as a full diagnosis, but recently backed off in response to pressure from clinicians, researchers and members of …
The Culture, Mind and Brain Conference and Tanya Luhrmann on “Hearing Voices in Accra and Chennai”
This past Friday and Saturday the Foundation for Psychocultural Research held its Fifth interdisciplinary conference on Culture, Mind and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications. I’m sad to have missed it, as it was clearly a very exciting event, bringing together key researchers from neuroscience, biocultural anthropology, cultural psychology, behavioral biology and other disciplines to discuss — in very concrete …
Psychiatric Neuroscience, Stigma, and the Aging Brain: Dispatch from the Annual Meeting of One Mind for Research
Cross-posted from The FPR Blog.
A few weeks ago I attended the first annual meeting of the One Mind for Research Campaign: Curing Brain Disease. (The group’s new CEO is Ret. General Peter Chiarelli, the commanding officer of the 1st Cavalry Division during the Iraq War, and you could practically taste the battle dust in your mouth at the …
Book Review: Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis
Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis: How schizophrenia became a black disease (Beacon Press, 2010) is an ideal introductory text for introducing students to ethical issues surrounding politics, prejudice, and psychiatric diagnosis. The reader will experience the indignity and paranoia that African American men being treated for schizophrenia in the 1960s and 1970s had to face. They will come to …Call for Research: Ethnography, Psychosis and At-Risk Groups
An article this week in Nature highlights new issues surrounding the intersections of psychosis, clinical risk, and adolescence. Psychosis is now thought to lie along a “continuum” in the population from “at-risk” groups who have “psychotic-like experiences” (PLEs) (e.g., hallucinations and delusions that are transient or do not disrupt social functioning) (Meehl 1962; Polanczyk, Moffitt et al. 2010) to people …