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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
The Madness within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process
by Robert Freedman
Oxford University Press, 2009. 198 pages. $35.00 (hardcover)
A perusal of The Madness within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process is well worth the time of anyone interested in schizophrenia research. Author Robert Freedman is a clinician and scholar who also has a family history of schizophrenia. Inspired …