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’.
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.
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?
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?
Recently I wrote about the difficulties of evaluating mental health phone lines. Following on from this I’ve been taking a look at research into how the training of therapists affects outcomes. Some of this research provides encouraging reading for helpers with less training – although by round-a-bout means.
Continue reading “Benefits of Informal Psychological Helping”
A couple of years ago there was an email going around that claimed to explain how we read. The email began:
“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
Continue reading “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy”
If people know that excessive exposure to UV rays causes cancer, why do they still insist on grilling themselves? Health psychologists would love to know the answer so they could help curb the growing rates of skin cancer. The obvious answer is that people think that tanned skin makes them look more attractive, but this is not the whole story.
Humans are thought be the only species that have asymmetrical brains. It is this specialisation between the sides of the brain that may have been an important factor in the development of language. Now, one researcher is suggesting that brain symmetry is important in mental illness.
Continue reading “Brain Symmetry Important in Mental Illness”
A team of psychologists at the University of Illinois have been investigating how driving is affected by simultaneous mobile phone use.
Continue reading “Hands-Free Mobiles Impair Driving Ability”
One in ten of us has had an out of body experience at some point in our lives. This can take the form of feeling like we have floated outside the confines of our bodies and are looking down on ourselves. Understandably, rigorous scientific studies are few and far between, but a few researchers have shown an interest in proving that the mind is able to travel outside the body.
Continue reading “Out of Body Experiences: Real or Imagined?”
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