Imperfect Cognitions

This is part of a series of posts reporting outcomes from a project on Agency in Youth Mental Health, led by Rose McCabe at City University. In the previous post , the project team explained why young people may have heightened risks of experiencing epistemic injustice in clinical encounters. Today, Clara Bergen  and  Rose McCabe  provide evidence that young people's sense of agency is sometimes undermined in such encounters. By analysing video recordings of police interactions, courtroom cross-examinations, and political news interviews, researchers have learned a lot about how institutional figures challenge what other people have felt or experienced.  For example, police and lawyers use subtle practices like asking questions that imply inconsistency or implausibility ( Stokoe et al 2020 ), anticipate a compromising response ( Drew 1992) , or imply disagreement ( Jol & van der Houwen 2014 ). Lawyers and political interviewers may take an adversa...

In this post, Lauren Dixon examines arguments by Sullivan, Pickard, and Pearce on epistemic injustice and nonsuicidal self-injury in healthcare. Lauren argues that the notion of epistemic injustice is useful for patient care and clinician education but that harm minimisation techniques are not the way forward. Lauren is a current MSc student at the  Institute for Mental Health , University of Birmingham. Her research interests include childhood well-being, bullying risk/protective factors, special educational needs and mental health advocacy. NSSI (non-suicidal self-injury) “ refers to the direct and deliberate destruction of one's own body tissue in the absence of lethal intent .” Epistemic injustice (a notion developed by Fricker, 2007 ) can be encompassed as failing to recognise a person as a ‘knower’ based on preconceived, and often incorrect ideas, about their identity. Fricker argues that there are two types of epistemic injustice: Testimonial Injustice (TI) and Her...

A nna Lavis is a Lecturer in Medical Sociology and Qualitative Methods in the Social Studies in Medicine (SSiM) Team in the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham. She also holds an honorary research position in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Her work explores individuals’ and informal caregivers’ experiences and subjectivities of mental illness and distress across a range of social and cultural contexts, both offline and on social media, with a particular focus on eating disorders and self-harm.  In this post Eugenia Lancellotta interviews Anna on her latest project, Virtual Scars: Exploring the Ethics of Care on Social Media through Interactions Around Self-Injury , funded by the Wellcome Trust, Seed Award in Humanities and Social Science. EL: How did you become interested in the ethics of care in self-harming online communities? AL: I started work on relationships between social media an...

On 15th October the Institute for Mental Health  (IMH) had its Inaugural Forum at Hornton Grange at the University of Birmingham. The event was live-tweeted by the Mental Elf and the IMH. The whole project PERFECT team attended the Forum and this report comes from their collective notes. In the morning session, Eoin Killackey (Orygen) and Paul Burstow (IMH) started the day with two fascinating talks on youth mental health. Killackey gave a very international talk, analysing a variety of interventions and forms of support available for young people across the world, reflecting on the many lessons those who wish to improve the UK youth mental health system can learn from these programs.  Two particularly interesting focal points were on how to improve the transition from youth to adult services, and how to better separate services on the basis of demographic and developmental evidence about the prevalence and nature of youth mental health difficulties.  ...

This post is by Angharad de Cates  (pictured above), a Senior Registrar in General Adult Psychiatry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Unit of Mental Health and Wellbeing at the University of Warwick. Broadly, her research interests are neurocognition, self-harm, mood disorder, and mental health promotion and wellbeing. In this post, she summarises her recent article “ Can we use neurocognition to predict repetition of self-harm, and why might this be clinically useful? A Perspective ” co-authored with Matthew Broome, and published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry in January 2016. The first issue in research about self-harm is to define what it actually is, which in part depends on which style of terminology you wish to use. According to patient and user groups, self-harm as a general catch-all term is preferred, where there is no attempt by clinicians or researchers to restrict by method or intent, but instead to focus on the fact that one has harmed ...

My primary research interests are in ethics and philosophy of psychiatry. For the past ten years I have worked as a lecturer and researcher in bioethics at the Centre for Ethics in Medicine, University of Bristol. Self Harm by Kerry Gutridge During the past four years, my research has focused on the ethical, legal, philosophical and policy issues of self harm. In particular, I have been concerned with the ethical questions which arise when doctors or nurses allow patients to self harm in psychiatric hospitals. I first encountered this issue when it was reported in the British press that patients were being allowed to self cut in some NHS hospitals. For example, one inpatient was allowed to keep a piece of glass in a locked draw in her room and use it to cut her knees. This idea is of course controversial . Many people find the idea of allowing patients to self harm in medical institutions at best counter intuitive and at worst sickening and morally wrong. However, I argue that i...