Philosophy & Psychiatry Seminar 

Abstract: 

Psychiatric disorders concern your experiences: your feelings, thoughts, perceptions and/or actions. Psychotropic drugs affect your experiences, too. How, then, can you tell if, or to what extent, your experiences are coloured by your disorder and/or the medication you are taking? As Karp (2006) put it: '‘If I experience X, is it because of the illness, the medication, or is it ‘just me’?’. Such so-called self-illness and self-medication ambiguities are common in psychiatry. My research focuses on people with recurrent depressions and how they navigate these difficulties. In this talk, I will (i) present some critique and refinements regarding the notion of ‘self-illness ambiguity’; (ii) present some preliminary findings from my qualitative interview study, and (iii) offer some points for discussion regarding the relation between depression and being yourself.

Bio:

Sanneke de Haan is Socrates Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Assistant Professor Clinical Bioethics at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. She works on topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. Her current research project focusses on so-called self-illness ambiguity for patients with recurrent depressions, and the development of a notion of relational authenticity. Her book on Enactive Psychiatry was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press.