Notes on Hypothesis Making in Medicine: Opiates and Opioids as a Unifying Framework for Mental Illness

This piece of work represents a continuation of a multivalent piece of interdisciplinary work which extends back over the last twenty years. In this social document two main purposes are being addressed, the first one being continuing a study of science and it’s information tools exploring the basis of how hypotheses can be constructed and tested so that the reader may get some sense of where an idea sits on a scale of increasingly or decreasingly reliable knowledge. Read more…

Reimagining Mental Health with Jill Anderson

This is a video record made of the Reimagining Mental Health event day organised by Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice (CCrAMHP). As a part of both participating in and recording of the event, this is a part of the Mad Studies work which I do which fosters critical perspectives in relation to psychiatry and the way mental health is culturally perceived.

Red Clinic Initiatives in Communities in Brazil

Red Clinic Initiatives in Communities in Brazil

Emotion as Taboo: Emotion as Dissent

The dismissal of the internal emotional lives of individuals at the bottom of a power hierarchy is a taboo which I’d like to transgress. In particular, it is interesting that emotion is discounted in culture. First of all, its immediacy is discretely invisiblised by the cultural reflex of saying this is not a reality – it does not happen; and by saying this tacitly is stated the assertion that the internal emotional lives are misapprehending things as they are. People often apologise after their emotional expressions. Read more…

Cult Behaviours: Devaluing the Outsider – Reviewing Prof Arthur J. Deikman’s Work

This is the third part of a review and digest of the work of Professor Arthur Deikman who published on cult behaviours examining how they manifest in every day circumstances. He likened the natural pull in everyone towards cult behaviour to the comfort of being a passenger of a car and being driven along without having to think about where the journey is going or how they are getting there. Read more…

Madness and Civilisation: David Cooper on Michel Foucault

This is a series of notes made on David Cooper’s introduction to Michel Foucault’s famous text Madness and Civilisation. The construction of madness is a chimera running through many different ages and societies, and changing in form over time. Now we face the chemical age, the age which superseded the use of straight jackets as restraints and destructive physical surgery to pacify people placed under the medical authority. Indeed the modern medical models came from attempts to use pre-operation anesthetics to sedate patients as managed inmates. Read more…

Cult Behaviours: Dependence on a Leader – Reviewing Prof Arthur J. Deikman’s Work

This is the second part of a review and digest of the work which Arthur Diekman published on cult behaviours manifest in every day life. As a professor of psychology he stressed how cult behaviours are intimately woven in the human’s psyche and actions arguing that for healthy, stable and constructive societies awareness of these facts was imperative.