On Wednesday, May 31st 2017
At: The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice, St Catherine’s
College University of Oxford, Manor Road OX 1 3UJ.
This one-day Advanced Seminar examines the theme of language
and the first-person perspective from a number of disciplinary perspectives, with
a particular focus upon the significance of these debates for people with people
with mental health conditions. The seminar is the third annual meeting of the Values-Based
Theory Network hosted by the St Catherine Collaborating Centre for Values-Based
Practice, in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.
How does it feel to be you acting in the world through the use
of language or actively entertaining your own cognitions? And what happens when
such a feeling is disrupted, ascribed to you by someone else or conferred upon something
else?
Our experience of the surrounding world and of our own selves
in thought and language is tightly linked to the first-personal sense of agency.
As such, its loss, disruption or misattribution can severely affect all aspects
of our conscious life. How we describe the experiences of mental illness also goes
hand-in-hand with dignity and respect, and thus something that everyone working
in mental health contexts needs to think carefully about.
In bringing together philosophers, psychologists, linguists and
lay representatives, the Advanced Seminar strategically responds to the BSA (2015)
Guidelines
on the use of language in relation to functional psychiatric diagnosis platform
statement that the profession needs to move towards a system which is no longer
based on a ‘disease’ model, yielding public affirmation of the large and growing
emerging evidence that experiences hitherto described in functional diagnostic terms
may be better understood in psychosocial terms.
Our aim is to open up a co-creative multi-disciplinary dialogue
between practitioners, academics and lay representatives about the ways we might
think and argue differently about the benefit of re-appraising the first-person
standpoint in understanding the experience of mental illness and self-knowledge
through the use of language, with a view to identify creative techniques for patient
empowerment, education and clinical treatment, in shaping future direction of the
research and innovation collaboration.
Confirmed speakers:
Anna Bergqvist
(Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University).
Eleanor
Chatburn (Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford).
David
Crepaz-Keay (Head of Empowerment and Social Inclusion, Mental Health Foundation).
Edward Harcourt
(Philosophy, University of Oxford).
Veryan
Richards (Lay participant and patient/carer representative, Royal College of
Psychiatrists/The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice).
Léa Salje (Philosophy,
University of Leeds).
Tim
Thornton (Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire).
Contact and registration: Dr Anna Bergqvist. Email: a.bergqvist@mmu.ac.uk
Welcome!
