Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative

Contemporary neuroscience reduces mental illness to brain-based operations, instantiating a division between biology and culture, mechanism and context, brain and biography. This has the effect of marginalising a richer, inner-subjective complex of individual meaning, personal history and narrative. This meeting surveys recent significant shifts in biological psychiatry methods for the assessment of mental illness and questions their validity and limitations. It also explores nuances and interstices between the regard of psychiatric disorders as neurochemical flaws or experiential conditions, the cultural history of psychopathologies and how brain-based accounts of mental illness circulate in the public domain and are incorporated in culture. 28.4.11: 14.00-20.00, 29.4.11: 09.00-19.00