Category: Psychiatry

Psychotherapy & The Self Illusion

Introduction This article has been written in reaction to a fear: Fear of so-called ‘biological psychiatry’. Many don’t like talking about brain scans and neural correlates in psychiatry, because when you reduce a person down to different anatomical brain regions and neurotransmitters inside the head, we don’t find a single self in there. Without a…

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The Irrational Fear of ‘Patient’

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” When Juliet Capulet spoke these famous lines to Romeo Montague, she attempted to convey that a name is an artificial convention; She loved the person called Montague, not the Montague name or family. Despite this, Romeo attempted to…

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Free Will versus Psychiatry

The following video was recorded at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Philosophy & Ethics of Psychiatry Seminar, 27th September 2014.

Psychiatry versus ‘Real Medicine’

(Artwork by Najin Tse) The commonly used phrases in psychiatry ‘organic psychosis’ and to ‘rule out organic causes’ strike me as very odd. Organic, in the sense of the word as it is used here, means there is a physical cause for the patient’s mental state. In turn, it implies that in other cases there…

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