Currently I'm working on a virtue ethics approach to the issue of whether examples of moral badness should be allowed in machine learning with artificial moral agents. Motivating the side that we should do so is of special interest to me, with a focus on actions that are not wrong yet worse than morally indifferent.
There is a unique kind of pain in losing your mind, not just once, but over and over. Losing your perception of reality, of your emotions, of your closest relationships-both across months and multiple times a day. Knowing deep down that something is wrong but being unable to stop it.
Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.
The movie opens with a brief prologue. A family is driving at night. They hit something on the road, which turns out to be a dog, and the dog dies. The daughter in the back seat is visibly upset. The mother consoles her by saying, "It was just an accident-Dad didn't do it on purpose." Then the title appears, and the main story begins.
Psychotherapy and counselling psychology, however, did not emerge from institutional logic. The field was forged within relational, psychoanalytic, and depth-oriented traditions that prioritize lived experience, symbolic meaning, cultural complexity, and human nuance over procedural standardization. Bureaucracy seeks predictability, yet psychotherapy was built upon a disciplined engagement with uncertainty.
Judith L. Rapoport, the head of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, published 'The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing,' a best-selling book that helped bring wide attention to OCD.
Polyvagal theory, introduced in 1994 by psychologist Stephen Porges, highlights the role of the autonomic nervous system in regulating our health and behavior. Our lived experience of engaging with the world is impacted by external environmental cues, internal physical sensations, and relational experiences (e.g., an impression of connection, safety, and trust between individuals). Neuroception is our body's unconscious surveillance system that shifts us into one of three autonomic states needed to respond to a situation: rest-and-digest (social and safe), fight-or-flight (mobilization), or shutdown/collapse (immobilization).
Evidence Based Medicine was formalized in the 1990s, largely by Canadian physician David Sackett. Sackett described the goal of EBM is to replace hunches and habits with data and clinical trials. Clinical guidelines were developed involving protocols that tell doctors which drug to prescribe first, what dose to use, when to escalate treatment, and when to refer a patient to a specialist.
Yes, there has been a shocking lack of progress in developing transformative psychiatric medicine (We need new drugs for mental ill-health, 5 February), but this may be because in mental health, drugs are not always the answer (see, for example, Richard P Bentall's Doctoring the Mind). Huge progress has been made in the effectiveness of talking therapies for example, free effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is available to all UK army veterans through the charity PTSD Resolution.
Most people will forget a name, misplace their phone, or lose track of a conversation at some point. Usually, those moments pass without much thought. But for many adults, especially as they age, small lapses can trigger a much deeper fear: Is this the beginning of cognitive decline? As a neurologist, I hear this concern often. And as a researcher, I have learned something important: Worry about cognition and cognitive disease are not the same thing.