Category: Psychology

[Illustration by M H Evans]

William of Occam has a lot to answer for. Let me explain. Psychology bloggers are getting excited over recent research in biological psychiatry that integrates the environment into aetiological models of mental illness. While these developments are to be welcomed, they do come relatively late in the day, bearing in mind we’ve already got evidence for myriad environmental causes including urbanicity, child abuse, social class and so on.

Continue reading “Environmental Effects in Mental Illness Models”

I just finished Lauren Slater’s book: “Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological experiments of the Twentieth Century”. These included the work done by B. F. Skinner on operant conditioning, Darley & Latane on the ‘bystander effect’, Harry Harlow’s soft monkey without milk, Rosenhan’s two fingers to psychiatric diagnosis and of course Milgram’s explanation of the Holocaust: people are weak and obedient.

It made me wonder. What will be the great psychological experiments of the 21st Century? Will there be any?

Opening Skinner’s Box

It can be difficult to see aspects of your own identity clearly without a contrast. As an Englishman amongst the English it’s hard for me to understand many aspects of my own Englishness. In the same way, without comparing myself to other people, I can’t accurately fathom my own personality. And so travelling is not just a chance to relax, eat out and take in the sights, but it’s an opportunity to get some perspective.

Continue reading “Oslo, Norway”

“The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don’t.”
– Ernest Rutherford

Morton Hunt’s excellent ‘Story of Psychology‘ helps explain why people doubt the scientific basis of psychology. Think about the famous figures in the history of the more physical sciences: Biology has Charles Darwin, Physics has Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Chemistry has Francis Crick and whole load of other people whose surnames are immediately recognisable: Anders Celsius, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and Louis Pasteur. Now famous psychologists.

Think for a moment…who have you got?

Continue reading “Wilhelm Wundt: The First Experimentalist”

The Royal Institution write to tell me they’ve got some fascinating public events coming up, one of which they are…

“…putting on with the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. It promises to be a good event – it’ll be interesting and a bit lighthearted. The last event in this series got into the ‘Best by day’ section of Time Out, and we’re hoping for an even better event this time.”

Sounds like fun!

More information is available on our website.

“Doctors from London University have revealed details of what they believe is the largest amount of ecstasy ever consumed by a single person. Consultants from the addiction centre at St George’s Medical School, London, have published a case report of a British man estimated to have taken around 40,000 pills of MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, over nine years. The heaviest previous lifetime intake on record is 2,000 pills.”
The Guardian

A new film, Unknown White Male, tells the real-life story of a man who, in July 2003, finds himself on the subway in New York with no idea who he is or where he is going. In footage shot a week later, he describes walking into a hospital on Coney Island in New York, to explain to the staff that he has lost his memory and only has a single clue to his own identity: a phone number he doesn’t recognise inside a book he is carrying. For their notes, the staff christen him ‘Unknown White Male’.

Continue reading “Unknown White Male”

On Thinking Allowed today, Nils Christie, Professor of Criminology at Oslo University startled me with a simple fact. Talking about imprisonment he mentioned that, at 141 per 100,000 of population, the UK has the highest rate in Western Europe. This figure is much higher than the rate in Scandinavian countries which is around 60 per 100,000. That wasn’t what startled me.

Continue reading “Imprisonment and Unequal Societies”

Over the past few months I have converted to all things Laurie Taylor. Well two things Laurie Taylor related anyway. The first is the excellent ‘Thinking Allowed‘ on Radio 4 which discusses the latest social sciences research. The second is a book he published a few years back called ‘Escape Attempts‘.

Escape Attempts was inspired by sociological research into how long-term prisoners cope with being inside. Specifically, how do they maintain their sense of identity?
While most of our lives are not as monotonous as those ‘inside’, this led to parallel questions about how we all cope with our everyday lives. After all, given that most of us go through many of the same motions day after day, how do we stay sane?

Continue reading “Existential Angst”

In a previous post I described how current methods of categorising mental health problems are not particularly reliable or valid. As Kendell and Jablensky (2003) point out, the lack of a clear dividing line between different categories of mental illness is a serious theoretical problem.

Nevertheless, the categories, flawed as they are, do have practical utility. Indeed, the DSM-IV states that no assumption should be made that there are entirely separate categories of mental illness. Similarly it states no assumption should be made that there is a clear dividing line between the sane and the insane. Despite these disclaimers, what is the practical effect of categorisation?

Continue reading “Utility of Categorising Mental Illness”