Tag: philosophy

From Brain Pickings: According to philosopher Alan Watts, the antidote to human frustration and daily anxiety is mindfulness and staying fully present in the moment. "He...

From Aeon: For the most part, the field of scientific psychology has adopted a Cartesian, individualistic understanding of the self. However, it is more likely...

According to philosopher Erich Fromm, the more technologically and intellectually advanced a society becomes, the more the society risks collective insanity, subjecting itself to...

In this essay for Aeon, Michael Bess presents some of the ways future brain-enhancing technologies could be dehumanizing.  "But if we’re not careful, we ignore the...

For Aeon, neuroscientist Stephen Fleming, discusses new studies attempting to understand the process through which 'changing one's mind' occurs in the brain. "Psychologists have long...

Professor Wendy Rogers believes that overdiagnosis itself is an epidemic and that the roots of the problem lie in an insufficient naturalistic disease-theory. Overdiagnosis, she adds, “can be harmful for the patient and also cause waste of a lot of resources.”

Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbert’s piece on “Why can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?” in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,” he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.

The decision by the National Institute of Mental Health to part company with the APA’s forthcoming DSM-5 should not be taken as evidence that biological psychiatry is entering a terminal decline. Far from it, as the Director of NIMH Thomas Insel’s blog of 29th April 2013 makes clear, the reason NIMH has opted for its own Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDoC) is because they believe psychiatric patients deserve something better.

It seems that all the wants I have now for going and doing are a drug withdrawal, of sorts. I have been hooked, addicted to motion, fed on credits, isolated from the earth, from my humanity and from myself.