Jenny Holtzer at the Baltic

I went to Newcastle last weekend to see the Jenny Holtzer exhibition at the Baltic which occupies, albeit sparsely, two of its floors and with the room pictured viewable from the top floor viewing balcony.

There are a number of paintings on the walls of which I recall three genres: magnified emails censored in black ink; prisoners hand prints; and maps of the planned invasion of Iraq. This is an exhibition concerned with the Iraq war and hence there is a standing sense of outrage at the war itself, its origins in oil and the use of torture but also more abstract or general issues of violence and sexual violence.

But the focus is the LED installations which are surpisingly visually gripping. One runs the length of a large room: ten strips of yellow LED display showing text running away from the door and apparently into the wall at the end. This slowly spells out fragmentary text: at times, perhaps, describing acts of violence or rape, at others much more anodyne. I spent a number of minutes reading another display which - during that time - described oil prices and OPEC policy in newsroom abbreviations. Yet another displayed brisk (political) slogans (Protect me from what I want) though I wasn’t sure what valence I should ascribe to them (I was reminded of Travis’s comments on the way language itself doesn’t represent the world as thus and so.)

Seeing the exhibition on a Sunday morning a further element of the experience was to hear the words being slowly read out by the children brought for a cultural morning out by their parents. Their flat toned recitation was an interesting counterpoint to the stripped down context of the displays themselves.

But with a sense that surface attraction and meaning are in a kind of tension in much contemporary art, I wasn’t sure what to make of the displays. Whilst de- and then re-contextualised in an art gallery, the use of text itself seemed a kind of cheat: a short cut to significance it perhaps did not finally earn.

Can there be generalisable research via community engagement?

The mainstay of the field research of ISCRI (and one of the constituent departments within it: Ethnicity and Health) is the community engagement model. Over the last ten years and more, UCLan researchers have used this to find the views of particular communities on particular issues (sometimes ‘hard to reach’ communities and taboo issues) especially when this has been needed to focus government policy and resources.

An integral aspect of the process has been the incorporation of social benefits. The research process involves the active participation of members of the target community who thus benefit from training (in research) and education (getting onto a degree programme) and thus an inflow of money into, and ongoing support for, the community in question. In return, local knowledge of the views of local communities can be more easily accessed by people who have local credibility.

Although ISCRI has a good reputation in this area, the approach does carry some essential tensions (about which I had an interesting conversation with Alastair Roy; in fact, warming to his critical theme, he almost seemed intent not so much to praise the community engagement model as to bury it). One obvious problem is that the local researchers are trained for only limited amounts of time. So the expertise ISCRI markets is at one stage removed from the coalface. Or, to put it another way, it is an ongoing task to ensure the quality of that local research.

Second, the focus is narrow and concerns local communities. So the claim has to be that the research approach or methods used for particular communities is bespoke and locally appropriate. But this suggests a regress: in order to measure the validity of research methods in particular local contexts, one would already need a valid meta-level research tool to assess the ground level tool. Sadly that too would need to be local. I’m not sure how this challenge could be addressed in principle although there is a practical fix.

That emphasis on locality suggests a third challenge: the approach potentially yields an understanding of communities in their own local terms. And that may well resist handy generalisation. In a crude slogan (with which I’m unhappy), an idiographic approach resists codification in nomothetic terms.

I suspect that the solution for these problems includes a weakening of the idiology of the community engagement model while retaining its practical virtues. Whilst it might work well for merely local knowledge (if the genuinely idiographic were possible), its broader validation needs an essentially general element. Ali, for example, suggested a model of partnership between experienced researchers and local trainees. The compromise would be that the research agenda would be couched in broader rather than merely local terms. The results would be more portable and more generalisable. But there would be less to the Winchean idea that communities expressed themselves in their own terms. But perhaps giving that up is more of a sentimental than a substantial loss.

The death of academic lunch

Last night I went to the leaving party of Kamlesh Patel, the head of the school (the International School of Communities, Rights and Inclusion, or ISCRI) in which I work. Given his personal role in setting up first his original department and then later the School, it was unsurprisingly rather a melancholy affair and I decided not to linger very long. In part, I left because, although I’ve been at UCLan nearly 5 years I have always felt that I arrived too late: that I wasn’t involved in the early and no doubt revolutionary days. But perhaps that’s always the way with institutions. At Warwick University, I missed (by 20 years!) the days of university and department (cf nation) building, of, for example, alcoholic work-free Friday afternoons: an idea now utterly alien and weird to modern university culture.

Today, by chance, was a ‘quarterly staff meeting’ (nee ‘staff away day’) and an opportunity too get a feel for how things will change with a new Head of School (the very sound Chris Heginbotham, the man who persuaded me to come to UCLan in the first place) but also the deteriorating financial environment for UK universities. Details of the latter make very depressing reading.

Now I am not a huge fan of such days: a whole day out with no progress on email and the ‘to do’ list, let alone research, and with only a nebulous immediate aim (the real aims are, I think, longer term). But, on the other hand, there’s a very welcome chance to talk to other members of the school working in different disciplines. And it’s funny that that remains an issue. Again back at Warwick, I got to meet colleagues from other departments when accompanying my Head of Department, Greg Hunt, for his lunchtime beer. The culture of academics meeting for lunch was just coming to an end. I had,eg., the final pint of beer pulled from the closing Staff Club on my first such visit. Thereafter Greg and colleagues would lean awkwardly against the main commercial bar.

Four years earlier, I began an administrative job at the LSE with, as a key role, taking a substantial lunch and talking to academics in their exclusive Senior Common Room (the irony that an institution started by the Fabians policed its SCR by pay grade was clear to all). This not unenjoyable task, aside from the fact I’m a stranger to a much by way of lunch, was premised on the fact that academics would take the time off to be there. I rather doubt it would work now.

I mention this because one of the clear ongoing tasks of the School is to learn to be more collective or perhaps corporate in its research, even whilst its undergraduate programmes remain discipline specific. The harsher economic climate drives that need. At the same time it is no doubt because of the increasingly financially orientated higher education system that the kind of social practices that sustained happy interdisciplinary alliances disappeared.

Values based practice in heaven?

In need of distraction late last night, I watched the start of the science fiction drama series Caprica and was struck by a wonderful conceit. On planet Caprica, right thinking people follow the Hellenic gods and monotheism is regarded as a strange and extreme religious sect. Quizzing the mistress of a religiously tolerant school, an agent investigating a terrorist attack carried out by members of the sect One True God says:

And how many of your students are practising monotheists? It doesn’t concern you, Sister: that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all knowing, all powerful being whose judgement cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

It had not occurred to me to think that an argument for polytheism might be that in an ethics based on theology the moral value-determining judgement of a single god might be thought to be totalitarian. (This seems not quite to be the Euthyphro paradox: working out which way the determination works between being good and being loved by the gods.)

But my colleague Bill Fulford, who champions the idea of a rational ‘dissensus’ about values over what he sees as the potentially abusive absolute standards of quasi legal bioethics, would surely love this. In the skies above Caprica, the many gods try to sort out what is good through free debate in a heavenly ‘values based practice’.

For a more serious view of values based practice see this.

Review of Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience

There is a review of Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti's Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience : Philosophical Perspectives  in Psychological Medicine. I'm pleased that my chapter at least gave the impression of using psychiatry to inform philosophy. Whilst my aim, I am not sure how true it actually was.

Psychological Medicine, 40 (2010). doi:10.1017/S0033291710000103 Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience : Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by M. R. Broome and L. Bortolotti (Pp. 382; £34.95; ISBN 978-0-19-923-8033). Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2009. 
Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience is a collection of consistently high-quality chapters addressing a variety of conceptual issues regarding the role that the cognitive neurosciences can play in psychiatry. Best described as a work of interdisciplinary philosophy, the book has a broader appeal than it would were it primarily an attempt to construe scientific psychiatry as a type of cognitive neuroscience. One feature of the book that may be of special interest to psychiatrists and psychologists is that the individual chapters focus on specific psychiatric conditions. Psychotic and delusional states are prominent, but addiction, personality disorders and memory disturbances also receive attention.
As befitting a diverse collection, the chapters have a variety of goals. Philosophical analysis is used to better conceptualize psychiatric symptoms, but information about psychiatric conditions is also used to advance philosophical understanding. Lynn Stephens and George Graham’s chapter on what is ‘pathological ’ in compulsions exemplifies the former approach. Tim Thornton in particular uses psychiatry as a tool for making progress on philosophical problems.
Schizophrenia and/or delusions are addressed in chapters by Richard Samuels, John Campbell, Philip Gerrans, Dan Lloyd, Shaun Gallagher, Keith Frankish, Anne Aimola Davies and Martin Davies, as well as the editors themselves. One of the interesting themes running throughout the book involves the exploration of phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience – especially with respect to delusions. Many thinkers have criticized the DSM and ICD categories for being too heterogeneous to support the discovery of underlying biological mechanisms. A similar argument is given here, namely, that a more accurate phenomenological understanding of psychopathology might provide a better map for discovering underlying pathological processes. Alternatively, as noted by Matthew Ratcliffe, information about underlying mechanisms might also contribute to an improved phenomenological analysis. Over the course of several chapters, a good case is made for the proposition that a significant potential exists for jointly reformulating our understanding of both disturbed consciousness and the nature of biocognitive mechanisms.
The contributors support using information from the cognitive neurosciences to advance the psychiatric knowledge base, but they generally do not advocate making the cognitive neurosciences the sole paradigm for scientific psychiatry. Here is where careful philosophical analysis offers an important contribution. Focusing the philosophical lens on specific scientific theories makes it clear that there are crucial background assumptions and normative considerations that (a) cannot be reduced to cognitive neuroscience and (b) are essential to our understanding of psychiatric disorders. As might be expected, this viewpoint is consistent with the general perspective of the editors Broome and Bortoliti in their own work.
There are valuable ideas in the book for anyone with an interest in the conceptual problems of psychiatry. Some of the more engaging chapters actually deal less with neuroscience per se. These chapters include Rachel Cooper on the science versus pseudoscience distinction, and Hanna Pickard on personality disorders as both Szasian and ‘ valid. ’
The two chapters prior to the editors’ epilogue are ‘big idea’ chapters that address psychiatric disorders, moral theory and the cognitive neurosciences. Written by Iain Law and Jeanette Kennett and Steve Matthews, they explore whether major depressive disorder is associated with compromised virtue/character and the implications that dissociation and amnestic symptoms might have for moral responsibility. Both claim that psychiatric symptoms result in reduced moral capacities.
These final chapters underscore a conclusion that readers are likely to draw as a result of carefully working through the various contributions, specifically, that thoughtful analyses like those offered throughout the book helpfully challenge us to think more deeply about science and psychiatric disorders.
PETER ZACHAR (Email: pzachar@aum.edu)

Living and Learning, Learning and Teaching: Mental health in higher education

There is a conference at Lancaster in March on Living and Learning, Learning and Teaching: Mental health in higher education at which I'll give a short paper on teaching philosophy of mental health. Details here.

Presentation for Amsterdam

I owe some fine folk in Amsterdam an abstract for a talk in a couple of months.

In my Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry I attempted to defend, in rather a breathless manner, three anti-reductionist theses. One such claim marks each of the three main sections of the book. The irreducibility of mind to brain; of moral judgements to principles; and of uncodified skilled epistemic judgement to codified evidentiary principles. In this paper I briefly reconsider the arguments for these claims. Whilst the targets differ in the three cases (reductionism in the philosophy of mind aims to discharge normative descriptions whereas principlism in the moral philosophy does not aim to derive normative judgement from norm-free principles), normativity nevertheless plays a key role in each case. In this paper, I aim to tease out the assumptions about the normativity that support anti-reductionism and the picture of both agents and subjects for psychiatry.