Two of the most engaging classes in my clinical training were electives: one on crisis and trauma, and one on existential psychotherapy. Emmy van Deurzen wrote one of the books we studied in the latter. Another great book: Man's Search for Meaning-Frankl. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think?

Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life?

theguardian.com

New website with brief concepts, research notes, and works in progress. It’s still an evolving project. My Visiting Scholar appointment at UC Berkeley begins August 1. Looking forward to the year ahead. diagnostic-capture-research.fieldnotes-unbound.chatgpt.site

When Interpretation Becomes Infrastructure | Monica Ross

Research by Monica Ross on how interpretations become embedded in psychiatric records, institutions, technologies, and systems that shape human self-understanding.

diagnostic-capture-research.fieldnotes-unbound.chatgpt.site

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well..." — Václav Havel One of my favorite quotes about letting go—is about holding on. I've been thinking about this while working on a talk for the fall on Ricoeur's capable human and the conditions that keep possibilities open.

The Texas State Board of Education has approved required Bible readings for Texas public schools. Which Bible passages are chosen may be as important as whether the Bible is included at all. In some versions, Eve is Adam's "helper"; in others, she is his "partner." Link below.

Which Bible texts are in Texas’ proposed student reading list?

The chosen readings, to be voted on soon by the State Board of Education, draw heavily from Christian perspectives.

texastribune.org

What seems central may prove incidental. What appears peripheral may later prove essential. Meanwhile institutions cannot wait for perfect understanding. The challenge is to build systems that do not entrap us by treating our capacity for change as a problem to be solved rather than a strength.

The question is not only whether a diagnosis is correct, but how it becomes evidence for itself. Once uncertainty is translated into authority, how do we find our way back to competing interpretations? Sooner or later, every field revises something it once considered settled.

This is our why. With the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, @barackobama.bsky.social's 2009 remarks ring true today: Generations of LGBTQ+ people are counting on us to fight for our rights and freedoms. We are stronger than the challenges we face. Let’s keep moving forward.

Some errors are easy to identify because they leave contradictory evidence. But what happens when an error influences the very evidence later used to evaluate it? Does that make the possibility for correction even harder?

A diagnosis can shape records, treatment, and interpretation. If the diagnosis was wrong, how would we know? And if we wouldn’t know, how many such errors remain invisible?

Some of the most important conversations in my work emerged in reaching beyond my home discipline. Questions about diagnosis led me into medical humanities, STS, philosophy, and literary studies. I'm grateful they did.

Douglas Dowland@profdgd.bsky.social · 2y ago

The subject of the medical humanities class this week is hope.

AI is forcing scholars to take a close look at reading. How has writing always been a technology? How does technology guide what and how we read? How are we contributing to novel forms and structures? And what new methods of reading might emerge in response? m.youtube.com/watch?v=N4PT...

Modes of Reading Today, Panel 5

YouTube video by Townsend Center for the Humanities

m.youtube.com

What an interesting lecture by @gracelockrobin.bsky.social today at our Women in Philosophy group! Here is the recording: youtu.be/tUUk5MLJvrA #philsky #eudsky #P4C #ethics Thanks @triphilosophy.bsky.social for supporting this lecture series.

Women in Philosophy: Grace Lockrobin on the significance of narrative in ethics education

YouTube video by The Philosophy Garden

youtu.be

In mental health care, we're increasingly asked to measure: symptoms, outcomes, engagement, even the therapeutic relationship itself. Measurement has its place. But some things are valuable because they exceed our ability to measure them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWo7...

Benjamin Recht: "The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us"

YouTube video by Matrixssdo Departmental

youtube.com

I have no doubt this is what Luhrmann observed. I've seen it in practice. Great book, btw. My only question for the profession: can many different lives really share a common label without losing something important?

I’m glad to share that my paper presentation will be published in Southwest Philosophical Studies, Volume 48, the online and open-access journal of the 2026 New Mexico Texas (NMTX) Philosophical Society. More when it’s available.

We see from different perspectives: outside and within, sometimes both at once. Yet we often treat one way of knowing as more reliable, more in touch with the objective outside, which itself is never fully free from bias. This shapes who gets to define what is truly real and what carries authority.

mj@malthusjohn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It seems that once you find a thread to pull & watch the unravelling of some widely-held belief or model, there is a particular pattern: it forces the abandonment of simplistic versions constrained by linear #reductionism. These do make decent starting points. www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-...

"AI Chatbot at Character.AI falsely claimed to be licensed in Pennsylvania and gave a fake Pennsylvania license number while holding itself out to be a licensed psychiatrist."

Shapiro Administration Sues Character.AI Over Fake Medical Claims

Shapiro Administration Sues Character.AI Over Fake Medical Claims

pa.gov

I’ve been sitting with this, trying to understand the new tool. There’s a real problem here: starting from scratch, retelling your story, losing context. But carrying your story forward depends on what gets captured. Over time, visits and records do more than preserve a story, they shape it.

Introducing Guide: Revolutionizing Mental Healthcare with AI | April Koh posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Today, I am so proud to announce the launch of Guide. Like so many, I've been on a lifelong journey with my mental health, moving through different therapists at different chapters of my life. I stil...

linkedin.com

In EMDR, we learn: when we see the bear, we move first. Meaning comes later. Add this: feeling, too, is part of that “later.” What something is (fear, danger, threat) gets assigned after—shaped by the categories we carry. A quiet challenge to the classical view, with implications for health.

Lisa Feldman Barrett@lisafeldmanbarrett.com · 3mo ago

How does your brain know that a cat is a cat? Your brain is a category generator. A conversation with @earlkmiller.bsky.social about our new paper in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience. In Nautilus @nautil.us (thanks Kristen French!). nautil.us/how-does-you... #neuroscience @nature.com

AI scribes can reduce administrative burden when used at a basic level. Ambient systems capture the full transcript, then select and organize what’s discussed into structured outputs. For anything to become an output, ambiguity has to be resolved.

Some people look as though they have a psychiatric condition, with hallucinations and delusions, but are actually experiencing an autoimmune illness. The divide is less stark than previously realized, and now physicians are working to bring neurological treatments to psychiatry.

How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness

newscientist.com

AI “scribes” can work well when they keep notes general and reduce detail overload.

Human-coded sessions become training data, then metrics, and begin to define what counts as “good therapy” at scale. Not just what we do, but how we read what’s happening. $20/hour to code therapy sessions. www.lyssn.io/about-us/car...

Grateful to be presenting at NMTX Philosophical Society’s 76th annual meeting this week. Also feeling affirmed in placing this work across English, health humanities, and philosophy—each asking something different of the same questions. Looking ahead to Berkeley and OHST.

futurism.com/health-medic...

Startup Approved to Let AI System Prescribe Psychiatric Medication

San Francisco-based startup Legion Health has been approved to have its AI chatbot fill out prescriptions for psychiatric medications in Utah.

futurism.com

Two weeks. Back to back presentations. Not just on diagnosis— but on what happens after an interpretation is made. When it sticks. When it circulates. When it begins to organize what can be seen.

I’ve talked about mislabeling. It’s also about how the conditions for what counts as understandable get set in advance.

The framing is revealing. This is some of what I’m tracking. When care becomes “architecture,” clinical reasoning becomes a layer, safety a constraint, and therapy a protocol. But mental health care is interpretive work. The risk isn’t AI. It’s designing care around what systems can formalize.

Diagnostic overshadowing: cognitive bias in clinical diagnosis. Once a person carries a diagnosis, clinicians may attribute new symptoms to the same label rather than reassessing. But reassessment itself occurs within diagnostic frameworks that both guide and limit clinical interpretation.