Hi! My name is Lisa
and I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Birmingham. I have
always been interested in the human mind, with all its amazing capacities and
its inevitable limitations. I worked on belief and rationality as a graduate
student, and I focused in recent years on the nature of clinical delusions.
Since October 2014 I am leading a research project on the
potential benefits of false beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory
explanations. These are things that we all experience on an everyday basis, but
that in some circumstances are considered to be symptoms of mental distress and
are used to diagnose psychiatric disorders. I want to explore the possibility that,
despite having disadvantages, inaccurate beliefs, memories and explanations contribute
to our wellbeing or to our capacity to interact with the physical and social
environment surrounding us.
If you are interested in seeing what we are doing as part of
the project, you can visit our Facebook page, read our blog, or follow us on Twitter! Recently we have
launched a new monthly feature on our blog, asking people to describe the
positive side of their experience with mental distress. So far, we had a
post on schizophrenia and outsider art, one on OCD, and we are delighted that Aimee
has agreed to write one
on BPD.
One of the cases we are currently looking at is manic
depressive illness. My PhD student, Magdalena Antrobus, is
writing her doctoral thesis on it. She is interested in whether creativity and
realism are enhanced in people with manic depressive illness. If you want to know more, please read her post
on creativity
and realism, her account
of the potential benefits of depression, and her interviews with
philosophers Greg
Currie (on creativity) and with Jennifer
Radden (on realism).
Aimee’s
post beautifully illustrates what we want to research. When asked to think
about how she benefited from BPD (almost an absurd question, I know!) she
answered mentioning both psychological
and epistemic advantages. She writes that she has had some amazing
experiences that she would not have had if it hadn’t been for her BPD-related
impulsivity. She also mentions that having an unstable sense of self forced her
to make a special effort to learn what her real values are.
This testimony is important for us. We don’t want to
trivialise or romanticise mental distress in any way, we realise that it causes
suffering and disrupts people’s lives. But we want to start offering a more
balanced view of what it is to be affected by schizophrenia, obsessive
thoughts, personality disorders, dementia, etc. in an attempt to undermine the
stigma associated with these diagnoses, and see in other people’s struggles and
achievements a reflection of our own weaknesses and strengths.