Taking back the brain: Trialling neurofeedback for voice-hearing

Hearing voices (also referred to as 'auditory verbal hallucinations') need not be associated with problems. However, for a number of people, they are. Problems are particularly likely to arise if the voices are frequent, say negative things, and if the person has no control over them. Different people want differ ways to cope with their …

50-to-life: Why the phenomenology of ‘hearing voices’ matters

The experience of “hearing voices” has been reported for millennia, including by people such as Socrates, Joan of Arc, and the Beach Boy’s Brian Wilson. It can be experienced in the context of a diagnosed psychiatric disorder (e.g., schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, anorexia), a neurological disorder, or by people without any diagnosis who may …

Schizophrenia is not a mental disorder?

There has been a lot of debate over the past decades about the reliability and validity of the diagnosis of schizophrenia. There has been the Campaign for the Abolition of the Schizophrenia Label, books such as Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, and most recently a 2016 paper in the British Medical Journal with a very unambiguous title: Despite such arguments, …

How do antipsychotic drugs have their effect?

Today I’d like to draw your attention to a new paper just published by Moritz and colleagues (link here), which examines how antipsychotic drugs have their effect. What did it do? This on-line study involved 95 people, who had experience of taking antipsychotics, completing a questionnaire called the Effect of Antipsychotic Medication on Emotion and …

Do people diagnosed with schizophrenia deserve organs?

 A breath-taking state of affairs Like most people working in the field of mental health, I am well aware of the stigma associated with schizophrenia as well as the appalling 15-20 year reduction in life expectancy that people with this diagnosis face (e.g., Laursen, 2011; Hennekens et al., 2005). However, I was still taken aback …