Mental Health Cover

In this post Matilde Aliffi, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews Derek Matravers (pictured below), who is professor of philosophy at the Open University, and has interests in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Derek is the author of  Fiction and Narrative (OUP, 2014) and has recently completed a book on empathy which will be published by Polity Press. MA: You are a leading expert in aesthetics and philosophy of art. How did you become interested in these areas? DM: There were three reasons for my interest. The first was that there were some really inspirational figures working in the area when I first went to University; in particular, Richard Wollheim who had been at UCL just before I arrived. Other greats, such as Bernard Williams, clearly had a keen interest in the topic even if they never wrote about (although Williams did write occasional pieces on opera, which have since been collected into a book).  Secondly, it was a natural extension of my interest...

This post is by Katharine Chisholm (pictured above), Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. In this post she discusses the study she and colleagues conducted of mental health education for young people, published in their paper  ' Impact of contact on adolescents' mental health literacy and stigma: the SchoolSpace Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial ' published in BMJ Open.  Educating young people about mental health and ill-health is important. Mental disorders impact young people disproportionally, with around two thirds of mental illnesses having their onset prior to the age of twenty-five. Young people also tend to have a relatively poor understanding of what mental illness is, and with a lack of mental health education in schools, young people report relying on popular media or cult images to gain an understanding of what mental illness might look like. These representations tend to be sensationalist at best and wildly inaccurat...

How do hope and optimism benefit our relationships? Does optimism predict post-release outcome for the incarcerated? Can I believe what I hope? Are children optimists or realists? Those were just some of the questions discussed at the hope and optimism midterm collaboratory in Estes Park, Colorado. At this interdisciplinary conference, social scientists and philosophers funded by the  Hope and Optimism Funding Initiative  presented their research. While the social science projects are halfway through their research, many philosophy projects are nearing the end. In this report, I will describe only a few projects and talks in more detail. (More information on the individual projects can be found  here .) In their project on optimism in children , Laura Hennefield and Lori Markson are investigating whether young children between three and six years of age are optimistically biased and whether this bias is affected by adverse environmental influences. They have designed a nu...

In this post Matilde Aliffi, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, interviews  Aaron Ben-Ze'ev , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, and President of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of the Emotions. Aaron (pictured above) works in the philosophy of psychology and published extensively on emotions and love. MA: What are the objectives of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of the Emotions ? AB-Z: Emotions punctuate almost all the significant events in our lives, but the nature, causes, and consequences of the emotions are among the least well understood aspects of human experience. In recent decades there has arisen a significantly greater interest in the study of emotions by scholars in various fields. Such an interdisciplinary interest and interaction are crucial for the understanding of emotions. Nevertheless, I believe that there is room for more intensive discussions among scholars about specifically philosophical issues with...

This post is by Lucy Allais (pictured above). Lucy teaches philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of California in San Diego. She partly works in the history of philosophy, on the work of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (mostly on his metaphysics but she is increasingly interested in his moral and political philosophy), and partly on some topics in moral philosophy and moral psychology, such as forgiveness, resentment, and related moral emotions. In this post she writes about her research on forgiveness .  Augustine once said that he knows exactly what time is until anyone asks him, and it seems to me that something similar can be said about forgiveness. It is a concept we are pretty confident we understand, until one tries to give a philosophical account of it, at which point it seems to start dissolving, to the point that a lot of philosophers have thought it to be paradoxical and impossible to make sense of. The dif...

In today's post, Peter Kinderman introduces his new book ‘ A Prescription for Psychiatry: Why We Need a Whole New Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing ’, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan. I am professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and President-Elect of the British Psychological Society . My research interests are in psychological processes underpinning wellbeing and mental health. I have published widely on the role of psychological factors as mediators between biological, social and circumstantial factors in mental health and wellbeing. I have been awarded (with colleagues) a total of over £6 million in research grant funding (from the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the NHS Forensic Mental Health Research and Development Programme, the European Commission and others). My most recent grant, awarded in 2015, was for a total of over £1m from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),...

Emilian Mihailov  (pictured below) is the Executive Director of the Research Centre in Applied Ethics (CCEA) and a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. Currently he is working on the implications of experimental moral psychology and neuroscience for normative and applied ethics. I will present some ideas I developed in my paper “ Is deontology a moral confabulation? ”, recently published in Neuroethics . Here is a provoking thought. What if the effort of philosophical theorizing is an exercise in moral confabulation to polish off track emotional responses, admitingly hard to resist given their evolutionary roots? Joshua Greene speculates that if you mix the fact we are largely driven by strong emotional responses with the tendency to make up plausible sounding stories to justify or explain these responses, you get deontological moral philosophy. As a philosopher who has done some work in the Kantian tradition, was I confabulating? I the paper I ...