Podcast: Myths of Popular Psychology by Prof Ray Miller

This is a podcast of Professor Ray Miller doing the next in his series of talks ‘What Has Psychology Ever Done For Us?’ where he is examining popular myths in psychology. Everybody is a psychologist and most of us have some understanding of how people work. Or, at least, we think we do. Often Psychology is accused of simply being common sense. As a science it merely confirms what we already know intuitively. After all, much of Psychology is common knowledge that we all share, right? Read more…

30th July 2015: We Control You; The Psychology of Obedience and Authority By Prof Ray Miller

Stanley Milgrams experiment

Come along to The Counting House at 7pm to listen to Ray, share a crust of bread, and learn about control…

 

Title of talk:

“We control you: the Psychology of obedience and authority”
No. 6 in the series “What has Psychology ever done for us?”
 

Bullet points of what you would like to talk about:

  • Are we really in control of ourselves?
  • Are our decisions individual or the result of group norms and pressures?
  • Can we easily be convinced to behave in ways we might normally find unacceptable?
  • Is there a ‘demon’ inside us that has to be controlled by Society and Civilisation?
  • How influenced are we by conformity, obedience and authority?

Read more…

Appeal To The Man On The Clapham Omnibus

An article appealing to the common sense of everyday people to think critically about psychiatry; an appeal to the man on the Clapham Omnibus. Famously On Sane People In Insane Places was a study done by David Rosenhan, a psychologist in America.  Central to the study was the question he posed, ‘If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?‘.  This seems a pivotal inquiry if billions upon billions of pounds are now involved in psychiatric drugs that are proffered as treatments for what gets described as mental illness. Read more…

Diagnostic Overshadowing and Psychiatric Diagnoses

The Mad World art exhibition is an aggregation of work by artists, groups, psychologists, psychiatrists, chemists, social workers, and survivors of the psychiatric industry.  It starts with the question: Can you work out who here is diagnosed as Mad ? It then introduces a logic problem created by Raymond Smullyan, one of the finest logicians of our time:… Can you work it out ? Read more…

Podcast: Psychiatry; A Woman’s Account of Being Sectioned

Here is an interview with a woman who recounts her experience of being sectioned by her husband. It is intimate and she talks about all the details of how it came about, what it made her feel and what she thinks retrospectively of the experience. She went on to become qualified in the field of psychology and so it presents a particularly interesting perspective on psychiatry.
The way that women encounter the world is significantly undermined in many ways.  We need only take a look at the difference in the levels of payment women get for equivalent jobs with their male counterparts.  This oral history represents a signifier into the gender differentials which can exist around voice and agency.  We know from records that in the past single women who had children out of wedlock – also illegitimate children – were often interred in mental asylums for the ‘social inconvenience’ they suggested to the dominant paradigm. Read more…