Centre For Medical Humanities

Reblog

Two New British Academy Fellows from Hearing the Voice

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Reposted with permission from Hearing the Voice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hearing the Voice is delighted to announce that Professor Patricia Waugh, co-investigator on Hearing the Voice, and our collaborator Professor Sophie Scott (University College London) have been elected as new British Academy Fellows, in recognition of their outstanding contribution to research.

Patricia Waugh has been a Professor of English at Durham University since 1997. She is a leading specialist on modernist and post-modernist literature, post-modernist theory and feminist theory, literature and psychoanalysis, feminist theory, contemporary fiction and literary theory. Recently, Pat has been interested in the relations between literature, medicine and science and the interdisciplinary negotiations between them. Much of her research at Hearing the Voice focuses on the representation of voice in the work of Virginia Woolf, examining Woolf’s experiments with voice in relation to narratological, aesthetic, psychological and philosophical theories of voice and hearing voices, as well as her own experiences as a voice-hearer within the medicine of her day. In 2014, she gave the first lecture in the British Academy’s Lecture on the Novel in English series, ‘Fiction as Therapy: Towards a Neo-Phenomenological Theory of the Novel’, which is available to view freely here.

Sophie Scott is a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Her research interests include the neural basis of vocal communication, speech perception, the expression of emotion in the voice, and the neuroscience of laughter.

The full list of new British Academy Fellows, which were elected at its annual general meeting, can be found here.

Congratulations Pat and Sophie on this fantastic achievement!

Images above: Patricia Waugh (left), Sophie Scott (right)

Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival Film Awards

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Cheryl McGeachan writes: On Wednesday the 24th October the sixth Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival Awards were held in Edinburgh. This was my second visit to the awards and once again I was overwhelmed by the talent and bravery displayed in the pieces. As the lights in the cinema were dimmed and the reels of film began to play it was evident that the films shown at this festival embody both the pain and fear of individuals experiencing mental illness but also the incredibly inspiring aspects of individuals finding ways to live on in their everyday worlds.

The awards were split into seven categories – best educational documentary, best animation, best personal narrative, best short drama, best long drama, best short documentary and best long documentary – and the quality of the winners in each of these was exceptional. Some of the themes covered included children and grief (All That Glisters), identity, stigma and discrimination (Transvisions), memory and personal histories (The Winner Loser), Alzheimer’s disease (Pollicino), family tragedy and friendship (Colour), asylum legacies (Maraquita) and many more (click here for details).

The films, for me, are moving and inspiring; a real indication about the importance of listening carefully to those experiencing mental illness at a range of different scales, and a reminder to continue to fight for better provision, care and understanding for everyone who requires it.

See Cheryl’s review of Luke Fowler’s Turner-prize nominated documentary about R D Laing “All Divided Selves” here.

The Experience Economy and the Mechanics of Wonder

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The following post by Jules Evans is reproduced with permission from Philosophy for Life.

I attended a seminar on wonder at the Centre for Medical Humanities in Durham last week. This post comes from our discussions there. Thanks to all the participants and to Martyn Evans for a great day.

Although religion is no longer a major force in most people’s lives, with only 15% of British people going to church regularly, we still long for transcendent experiences, for experiences of wonder, awe and ecstasy.

We simply want the emotional experience without any ethical, doctrinal or metaphysical commitments demanded of us. Above all, we insist that such experiences leave our autonomy intact – we don’t want to be sucked in to any ‘cult’, we don’t want to obey any ‘leader’, and we certainly don’t want to kneel to any God.

We desire what Ian Kidd called ‘shallow’ experiences of wonder, which don’t demand that we change our selves, as opposed to ‘deep’ experiences of wonder, which do.

This is a paradox of modern rationalist liberalism – we exist in societies in which self-control is a core virtue, in which we are terrified of appearing out-of-control to other people. Ecstatic experiences, once a central part of human existence, have come to seem embarrassing and even psychotic.

And yet we also long for such experiences. We simply want them on our own terms. We want to be in control of how we lose control, like a sophisticated consumer at an S&M convention.

There is now a growing ‘experience economy’. As James Wallman writes in his book Stuffocation, consumers are becoming less ‘stuff-focused’, less obsessed with buying things, and more interested in buying experiences.

You can see this emerge in the 1990s, for example in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996), the hero of which declares:

For mine is a generation that circles the globe and searches for something we haven’t tried before. So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience. And if it hurts, you know what? It’s probably worth it.

Like Alex Garland’s hero, we travel the world hungry for new experiences, from ghost-hunting to ayahuasca tourism. We can go to Peru to hire the shaman, or stay in Hackney and the shaman comes to us. 0800 S-H-A-M-A-N. Press 3 for ecstasy.

There is also experience journalism. Its father is Hunter S. Thompson and its flag-bearer is Vice Magazine. Everything comes down to the experience of the journalist. They don’t just interview a celebrity. They interview a celebrity while on acid. They don’t just report on Lebanon. They go paint-balling with Hezbollah.

Techniques of ecstasy

Because of the growing experience economy, there is a desperate search to discover the formulas for ecstasy and wonder. You see that most obviously in drugs, in the search for new chemical formulas to achieve altered states of consciousness.

But you also see it in the arts, with artists searching for new ways to create powerful emotional reactions in their bored and wearied audiences. Hence theatre becomes ‘immersive theatre’, cinema becomes ‘secret cinema’, restaurants become ‘experience restaurants’.

Artists are constantly searching for what Mircea Eliade called the ‘techniques of ecstasy’ – we could also call it the ‘mechanics of wonder’.

Take the evolution of rhythm and blues, rock & roll, and soul in the 50s and 60s. Artists like Ray Charles and Elvis Presley took the ecstatic tropes and techniques of Pentecostal worship – the screams, the hollers, the shaking, the call-and-response, the build-up, the drop – and secularized them. They brought them to a mass audience, including many white middle-class kids who did not go to church – certainly not that kind of church.

Other artists soon followed in their footsteps, eagerly studying each other’s songs for clues as to how to get the audience going. We hear how the musicians at Stax Records, for example, would sit in the studio’s record store, ‘figuring out what was the hit part of a song, pulling that hit part out and developing a whole new sound from it’.

They’d also imitate their performance styles – the Rolling Stones go on tour with Ike and Tina Turner, and Mick Jagger intently studies Tina’s dancing. Soon he’s copying her whirling dervish dance, which she in turn took from Pentecostal church preachers. He also steals moves from Little Richard, James Brown and others. He studies how to create the maximum emotional effect through gesture.

Soul music searches for the ‘hook’, the technique of ecstasy. Likewise, rave music searches for the ‘drop’, the way to build up a crowd to a crescendo and then release them into a frenzy. There is a mechanical skill to this, like working out how far to stretch a rubber band before letting it go.

This is the mechanics of transcendence. You set up expectations, and then fulfill the promise. Sometimes, the longer you delay the fulfillment, the greater the pay-off. Wagner delays the fulfillment of ecstasy in Tristan and Isolde until the fifth act, leaving the audience weak with delayed gratification.

Or you somehow mess with the audience’s expectations, which creates an emotional shock, even a rage, until the new formula becomes predictable and expected. Think of the discordant chord at the end of Strauss’ Salome, for example, and the outrage it created (it’s 8 minutes 54 seconds in on this clip):

Shakespeare loved to mess with audience’s genre expectations – Hamlet, the revenge hero wondering what the point of revenge is. ‘Is this the promised end?’ asks Gloucester in King Lear. Shakespeare creates emotional responses by messing with the promises he or his source material makes to the audience.

Lou Reed, David Bowie and the Pixies gave pop music new life in the 60s, 70s and 90s by creating songs that both confirmed and defied our expectations of pop – they jar us with the discordant, and then reassure us with the melodic. The Pixies’ ‘Dead’ is the great example of this – harsh, discordant and then suddenly breaking into conventional melody at 1 minute 17 seconds in

New technology creates new avenues for experiences of ecstasy and wonder – the knowledge of 12th century masons enabled the architectural wonder of Gothic churches, the development of the electric guitar in the 50s enables rock and roll, the development of the synth enables disco and rave, the development of 3D technology enables a renaissance in ‘wonderful’ films like Gravity and Avatar.

But what is new and intense rapidly becomes hackneyed and cliched through repetition. The consumer audience become wearied and unresponsive, like a girl at a bar hearing the same tired pick-up-line for the hundredth time, like a rubber band that has been stretched and released too often.

There is an inherent capitalist tendency to exhaust any successful formula for wonder: Cirque du Soleil finds a successful approach, so it is rolled out until its eventually running shows at almost every major casino in Las Vegas. Vegas is the ultimate experience economy. It wearies the palette, finally benumbing it.

Contemporary religion can also become part of the experience economy. A priest once said: ‘What happens when the Holy Spirit doesn’t turn up? There is a temptation to fake it.’ Churches come to rely on well-oiled techniques of ecstasy to give their congregation the experiences they desire and pay for, while the faithful start to ‘shop around’ for the best church experience.

Likewise, humanist alternatives can end up providing experiences for the bored metropolitan consumer. They ‘curate’ exquisitely tailored experiences for the discerning metropolitan – with talks, poetry, music, perhaps a bit of philanthropy, food and cocktails for an ‘exclusive crowd of bright and beautiful people’.

Can we go beyond this? If so we’d need to allow ourselves to be changed by these experiences. We’d also need to be willing to sacrifice some of our autonomy, and to make commitments to something beyond the self – whether that be God, a cause, or other people. It also means being prepared to show up when we’re not in the mood, when we’re not feeling bright and beautiful, when we’re feeling weak and ugly.

Our own emotional experiences can’t be the focus – that is the emotivist solution to the loss of religious faith, the solution of GE Moore, Walter Pater and others, and it doesn’t work. If you make your emotional reactions the goal or meaning of life, you end up forcing them, squeezing them, over-monitoring them, and rapidly feel wearied and numb.

The experiences of wonder and ecstasy shouldn’t be the end, but rather an occasional and often unreliable guide towards an end beyond the self. That’s what Rumi is getting at when he writes:

 

Tear down this house
A hundred new houses can be built
from the transparent yellow carnelian buried beneath
and the only way to get to that
is to do the work of demolishing and then
digging under the foundation…
You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop,
where you barely make a living sewing patches
on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath
are two veins pure red and bright gold carnelian.
Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.
You’ve got to quit this seamstress work.
What does the patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating
and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body
is always getting torn. You patch it with food
and other restless ego satisfactions. Rip up
One board from the shop floor and look deep into
the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.

 

Jules Evans is the Policy Director at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions and edits the History of Emotions blog. You can read more about his work on transcendental experience at his web site Philosophy for Life And Other Dangerous Situations.

The letter to the scientific/medical editor: a neglected genre within medical humanities?

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This month’s (August’s) edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry features an editorial entitled, “Antipsychotics: is it time to introduce patient choice?”. The authors (Anthony P Morrison, Paul Hutton, David Shiers and Douglas Turkington) make an important and provocative argument (given the journal in which their editorial appears – which is not best known for heterodoxy within psychiatry), which is grounded upon an interrogation of “whether everyone who meets the criteria for a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis requires antipsychotics in order to recover.”

There have, to date, been nine letters published by the BJP responding to this article. One of them is mine (“Long-standing arguments from the service user movement reprised in the BJPsych”). Notably, none is by a self-identified psychiatrist – a fact certainly worthy of reflection.

What narrative options are afforded to letter writers to scientific/medical journals? “N”, the author of the blog Ruminations on Madness, is the author of a letter responding to the editorial that the BJP has, to date, not published. N has posted that unpublished letter online ­– thereby entering it into what I fantasize can become part of a dispersed and virtual archive of ‘not-published-letters’ that future historians of psychiatry will be able to use as a rich source. N has also written a fascinating analysis of the 9 letters that have to date been published, arguing that:

there are two, fairly clear categories: letters from established academics (none of whom, whether they are or aren’t, explicitly describe themselves as user/survivors) and … two accounts from “unambiguous” service users. The former are predictably ‘academic”—i.e. any obvious (non-empirically grounded) descriptions of experience and sociopolitics inevitably involve others, not the letter writer—whereas the latter revolve around (and to a large extent rhetorically depend on) rich personal self-description.

N concludes by arguing that the editorial decisions by the BJP on this occasion contributes to the “relentless fortification and re-fortification of the ‘first person account’ and/vs the properly academic commentary”.

N’s post made me think in much greater detail about how I imagined my own narrative options as a letter writer. My letter would belong to the group that N categorises as “letters from established academics (none of whom, whether they are or aren’t, explicitly describe themselves as user/survivors).” I know that I redrafted my letter a number of times prior to submitting it. In the process, I shifted its register, the implied reader, and, not least, the narrative voice. In its earlier iterations, the letter was grounded within – and took as its well-spring – the service user movement (to use a complex abstraction, if ever there were one). For a number of complex reasons, I positioned myself in later iterations of the letter (including in the version that was published) as in some ways to one side of the service user movement. While one of my (honorary) affiliations is listed as the Service User Research Enterprise, a unit in which the vast majority of staff use, or have used, mental health services, the published letter’s narrative voice appears to usher – I think – more obviously from the medical humanities, as well as from human rights advocacy. (I list, alongside my position in Durham’s Centre for Medical Humanities, another affiliation – the international human rights organization, the Mental Disability Advocacy Center.) The letter thereby comes to ‘represent’ the arguments of the service user movement without necessarily being part of it. Thus the published letter sits much more obviously on the ‘academic’ side of N’s divide between the ‘academic’ and the ‘personal’, whereas it had, in its origins, perhaps tried to scuff the dividing line.

My exchanges with N on such matters have also made me see anew the challenges I face as a historian of psychiatry who reads letters in psychiatry (and related) journals from the twentieth century. How, in short, do I read, and interpret, and frame, those letters – and those letter writers? How ought I try to think through the generic constraints, as well as the range of possible narrative voices, that shaped (in not entirely conscious ways) the letters of those who wrote, for example, to the editors of US psychiatric journals in the 1960s? How do I try to understand what drove some (male) doctors in the fin-de-siècle to write letters to journals such as the British Medical Journal or the Lancet, in which they publicly claimed for themselves the new nosological category of agoraphobia? How do I attempt to infer the kinds of editorial decisions that determined, at different moments, which letters were published or not? I know of a few examples of famous/notorious cases within psychiatry of letters being ‘sat on’ by editors (because of the controversies surrounding the research to which the letters were responding), or of the full list of letter authors transmogrifying upon publication into a lonely sole author. But a fuller history of the “letter to the editor” remains – at least to me – obscure.

Is there a body of work out there by medical humanities scholars and historians of medicine/science that carefully analyses the generic constraints of “letters to the editor” of medical and scientific journals? Are there case studies that explore particular historical moments at which that genre was cemented or transformed? And are there – and this is perhaps what I am most gripped by – analyses that have pieced together fugitive archives of that lonely artifact, the unpublished letter to the editor?

Why Should Academics Blog?

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Why Academics Should Blog: A College of One’s Own is a fantastic post by Stephen T Casper on his blog The Neuro Times. “The amazing thing about blogging,” he writes, “is that an author can capture all of those feelings that sustain scholarship.” Here is an extended excerpt:

“But most importantly, scholars need to make everything they do count in multiple ways: those blog book reviews can become the foundation of essay reviews or serve as literature reviews for new articles. They can also act as brief and searchable notes for teaching purposes that help to maintain a critical and cutting-edge classroom. Similarly, brief critical reflections on recent articles and books can develop with time into abstracts for conferences and workshops, which can become the basis for further grant applications or new articles. The joy of reading a new primary source can be shared with others who have read it and also enjoyed it. And the little things matter too: blogs come equipped with the capacity to tell you that a reader came to your site and read a page from your blog.”

You can read the rest here.

See also Geoff Maslan’s article “Academic Bloggers Everywhere” from the University World News web site, and Deborah Lupton’s fantastic posts about social media for sociologists.

Anxieties of communication: the limits of narrative in the medical humanities

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What is and should be the role of narrative in the medical humanities? Responding to Angela Woods’ 2011 paper The limits of narrative, Dr Claire McKechnie (Glasgow Centre for Population Health) advances the discussion in her recent article for the BMJ Medical Humanities journal “Anxieties of communication: the limits of narrative in the medical humanities.” The abstract appears below, and access to the article (for subscribers) is available here. We welcome your contribution to this debate!

Anxieties of communication: the limits of narrative in the medical humanities
Claire Charlotte McKechnie
Med Humanities doi:10.1136/medhum-2013-010466

Abstract: This paper aims to provide an initial response to Angela Woods’s endeavour to ‘(re)ignite critical debates around this topic’ in her recent essay ‘The limits of narrative: provocations for the medical humanities’ (Medical Humanities 2011). Woods’s essay challenges the validity of the notion of the narrative self through her discussion and use of Galen Strawson’s seminal ‘Against narrativity’ (2004). To some extent in dialogue with Woods, this article will examine three exploratory concepts connected with the topic. First, it will explore ways in which we might seek to re-place narrative at the centre of the philosophy of good medicine and medical practice by reassessing the role of the narratee in the narrative process. Second, it will reconsider the three alternative forms of expression Woods puts forward as non-narrative—metaphor, phenomenology and photography—as narrative. Finally, and connected to the first two areas of discussion, it will reflect on ways in which narrative might be used to interpret illness and suffering in medical humanities contexts. What I hope to show, in relation to Woods’s work on this subject, is that in order to be interpreted (indeed interpretable) the types of non-narrative representation and communication she discusses in fact require a narrative response. We employ narratology to engage with illness experience because narrative is so fundamental to meaning-making that it is not just required, it is an inherent human response to creative outputs we encounter. This is a quite different approach to the question of narrativity in the medical humanities, and it is therefore related to, but not entirely hinged upon, the work that Woods has done, but it is intended to spark further discussion across the emergent discipline.