psychosis
psychosis

Schizophrenia and genetics

There was an interesting news item yesterday on the BBC news site about schizophrenia and genetics1.  The story reports on an article published in Nature, which is the write- up of a large research project into the genetic dimension of schizophrenia. According to the story, scientists have found more than …

Why psychosis?

There is a long and somewhat unfortunate tradition within psychoanalysis that appears to ‘downgrade’ psychosis.  In other words, psychosis is seen as something of an aberration in relation to the ‘norm’ of neurosis.   This is not to say that psychoanalysts don’t work with psychotics – far from it- but one …

Bipolar and psychosis

Darian Leader has recently written a book on bipolar1, which is the new name for an old form of psychosis, namely manic-depressive insanity (to use the term adopted by Emil Kraepelin). Leader’s central argument is that manic depression (bipolar) is an attempt to avoid contradiction, because the individual is unable …

Whither anti-psychiatry?

Back in those halcyon days of the late 1960s there were some unlikely heroes, who almost overnight seemed to rise into the stratosphere of celebrity (and cult) status.  One of these was Ronald Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had some ten years earlier written what must truly be …

On being mad

The recent court ruling on Anders Breivik1 highlights a number of important issues relating to the nature of madness.  The judges found that he was sane at the time he carried out the bombing of the government buildings in Olso and the subsequent shootings on Utoeya island.  In other words …

Is James Holmes psychotic?

In the wake of James Holmes’ shooting frenzy in Aurora, which left twelve people dead and at least 58 injured, arguments have already begun about his state of mind, and more specifically whether he is mentally ill or not.  Interestingly, part of the argument seems to hinge on whether a …

Psychosis: the Breivik dilemma

One of the interesting things to come out of the ongoing Anders Breivik trial is that there seems to be a disagreement amongst the psychiatric profession regarding Breivik’s mental state.  The original psychiatric report published last November concluded that he was psychotic.1 The second psychiatric report, published in April by …