Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, ɬ
Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry
The Situated Brain:
Culture, Context and Ecologies of Mind
June 27 - 29, 2023
Montreal, Québec
2023 ASI Conference Program
Advanced Study Institute Conference and Workshop (June 27 - 29, 2023)
Psychiatry has invested in neuroscience research in the hopes that brain research will provide better understanding and more effective approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Precision psychiatry aims to harness multi-omics, systems neuroscience and big data to generate predictive models that can advance psychiatric theory and clinical practice. To date, however this has continued to yield reductive approaches based on molecular, physiological or neural circuit dysfunction and corresponding pharmacological interventions. Recent work in cognitive science provides an alternate view of brain function as mediated by embodied, enacted, contextually embedded, and environmentally extended processes that constitute a social and cultural ecology of mind. What are the consequences of this ecological view of the brain for cultural psychiatry? Can these views help us rethink the place of neuroscience in an integrative, person-centered psychiatry? This Advanced Study Institute will explore the impact of these new views of mind, brain and person on our sense of self, psychiatric disorders, and processes of healing and adaptation. An interdisciplinary group of scholars will address questions at the intersection of cultural psychiatry, cognitive science and neuroscience, including: (1) ecological and 4E cognitive science views of the mind, brain and person; (2) impact of variations of culture and context on brain functioning and psychopathology; (3) incorporating social context and process in neuroscience research; and (4) translating neuroscience research into culturally informed mental health policy, systems and clinical practice.
The format will be a 2-day Workshop (June 27-28) for researchers working on these issues, followed by a public Conference (June 29) directed to mental health practitioners, researchers and students. The workshop will involve intensive discussion of pre-circulated papers by participants. After peer review, selected papers will be published in a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry.
Guest Faculty: Axel Constant, Sanneke de Haan, Guillaume Dumas, Miriam Kyselo, Maxwell Ramstead, Matthew Ratcliffe, Andrew Ryder
ɬ Faculty: Véronique Bohbot, Suparna Choudhury, Ian Gold, Ana Gómez-Carrillo,Laurence J. Kirmayer, Michael Lifshitz, Samuel Veissière
Selected recordings and abstracts below:
Laurence J. Kirmayer -Introduction: The Situated Brain
Laurence J. Kirmayer -The Situated Brain: Ecologies of Mind, Brain and Culture
Psychiatry has invested in neuroscience research in the hopes that brain research will provide better understanding and more effective approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Precision psychiatry aims to harness multi-omics, systems neuroscience and big data to generate predictive models that can advance psychiatric theory and clinical practice. To date, however this has continued to yield reductive approaches based on molecular, physiological or neural circuit dysfunction and corresponding pharmacological interventions. Recent work in cognitive science provides an alternate view of brain function as mediated by embodied, enacted, contextually embedded, and environmentally extended processes that constitute a social and cultural ecology of mind. What are the consequences of this ecological view of the brain for cultural psychiatry? Can these views help us rethink the place of neuroscience in an integrative, person-centered psychiatry? This Advanced Study Institute will explore the impact of these new views of mind, brain and person on our sense of self, psychiatric disorders, and processes of healing and adaptation. An interdisciplinary group of scholars will address questions at the intersection of cultural psychiatry, cognitive science and neuroscience, including: (1) ecological and 4E cognitive science views of the mind, brain and person; (2) impact of variations of culture and context on brain functioning and psychopathology; (3) incorporating social context and process in neuroscience research; and (4) translating neuroscience research into culturally informed mental health policy, systems and clinical practice.
Matthew Ratcliffe - Grief as a temporally extended, socially scaffolded process
This paper addresses what we might learn about grief by studying the brain. A first step is to clarify the explanandum: what, exactly, is grief? The most plausible answer, I suggest, is that grief is a highly variable, temporally extended process. A grief process can incorporate all manner of experiences, thoughts, and activities, most or even all of which are not specific to grief. Furthermore, grief’s course over time is regulated in many different ways by interpersonal, social, and cultural environments. This adds up to a methodological challenge for affective neuroscience. First of all, it is clear that straightforward generalizations concerning grief and the brain will not be forthcoming. In addition, the case of grief draws attention to the more general limitations of any approach that emphasizes fleeting emotions and neglects the longer- term structure of human emotional life. What is needed is a perspective that accommodates— and also illuminates—the dynamic, temporally extended, and scaffolded organization of emotional processes.
Ana Gómez-Carrillo - Pragmatics of complexity in psychiatric theory, research and practice
In this paper, I outline a framework for thinking about mental states that offers a heuristic for a more integrative understanding of everyday experience as well as certain kinds of psychopathological experience. I connect work from authors across disciplines that has previously remained insufficiently linked. I take as a starting point Blankenburg’s work on the loss of the ‘natural taken-for-grantedness’ which he considers is the mainstay of experience in a common world of pragmatic concerns. After briefly examining the implications of the social, relational and contextual nature of the natural taken-for-grantedness, I relate it to one’s range of available and accessible possibilities for experiencing everyday life, also conceptualized as social-cultural affordances. Affordances imply a relational loop between organism and environment that is constitutive of experience. To advance this, I draw on Hacking’s concept of biolooping and consider the role of certainty and allostasis in sustaining the natural taken- for-grantedness and configuring one’s possibility space. I then explore how varying constellations of the ‘natural taken-for-grantedness’ and affordances affect the pre-reflective background sense of belonging in the world, that Ratcliffe terms “existential feeling”. The paper ends by illustrating the role of ‘natural taken-for-grantedness’ for everyday experience and its continuum with psychopathological experience.
Suze Berkhout - Multiplicities and transdisciplinary methods for situated neurosciences
A contemporary neuroculture is argued to have developed from the 1960s onward, whereby human experience has been increasingly understood in neurochemical terms. Central to this has been the rise of an increasingly coordinated field of neurosciences and a resultant neuromolecular gaze—a style of thought and a larger onto-epistemological lens that understands any mental state, process or experience to reside in the brain, such that it can and should be anatomized at a molecular level, with neurotransmission (and, increasingly, neural networks) as a key explanatory process. In many ways, the notion of “situated neurosciences” calls this gaze into question, while at the same time continuing to locate meaning in the stories that are told through neuroscientific explanatory frameworks. In this paper I turn to issues of method: how might we study situated neurosciences such that we maintain a sense of complexity, simultaneity, and multiplicity—understanding what situated neurosciences offer as stories that have truth in the telling and that welcome, rather than foreclose, other modes of explanation. Multiplicity and mess are meant as a nod to the ways in which any particular event, object of knowledge, situation, or paradigm can be understood to be the coexistence of multiple, articulating, overlapping ontologies constructed through our methods and approaches. Here, I speak to methods that embrace the messiness of multiplicity, reading these as necessarily sitting at disciplinary borderlands. Borderlands are an in-between space that can be inhabited within and through competing and fluid, yet coexisting, ways of being. As Maria Lugonés has explained, border dwellers are characterized by a tolerance for contradiction and ambiguity, the transgression of rigid conceptual boundaries, and the creative breaking of paradigms; crucially, the logic of borderlands pushes against the frontier logic of coloniality. In this paper, I ask what it would take for situated neurosciences (and neuroscientists) to do the disruptive work of border dwelling. Thinking across praxis within sensory and imaginative ethnography, artistic knowing-exploration through research creation, and interdisciplinary-intersectional readings (what Katherine McKittrick terms the “multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers, songs, grooves”) of Black feminist and anticolonial science studies, I look to relationality and attentiveness to socio-material accomplishment/choreography in method- making as key aspects of this kind of border dwelling.
Guillaume Dumas - Computational tools beyond computationalism
Computational psychiatry is a growing field that uses computational models to better understand mental health and disease. Even though these models have taught us a lot about how mental illness works in the brain, they often leave out social and environmental factors. In parallel, precision psychiatry uses computational tools to diagnose and treat mental conditions better. But in the same way, even though these tools have already shown promise in clinical settings, the mechanisms being studied are still primarily based on a reductionist view of how the brain works, with a focus on molecular pathways and neural circuit dysfunction. Both those disciplines are thus in sharp contrast with increasing awareness in cognitive science that brain functions are strongly mediated by social and cultural dynamics—an "ecology of minds" composed of embodied, enacted, contextually embedded, and environmentally extended processes. I will argue in this talk that computational models and tools can fully integrate the embodied and social dimensions of the human mind without necessarily embracing "computationalism" and considering the brain as a computer. We will explore how computational tools can be integrated into psychiatric research and translate the results into clinical practice and health policies. Starting at the dyadic scale, we will present in-silico simulations of two brains engaged in social interaction and illustrate how intra-brain biological structures impact inter-personal dynamics. We will discuss how these biophysical results support the misattunement hypothesis of autism and also question the impact of telemedicine on the clinical alliance. Moving on to the group level, we will then show multi-agent simulations to demonstrate how the dynamics of the group are affecting individual beliefs and even conscious experiences. Finally, zooming out to the society scale, we will examine the role of epidemiological analysis in understanding the social determinants of health. We will also discuss how the metaverse enables social sandboxing for health systems and interventions. We will conclude by discussing how the ecosocial view of the brain can help us rethink the place of computational methods in integrative, person-centred psychiatry.
Denielle Elliott - Situating injured minds
Medical sciences remain the dominant point of reference for understanding the brain generally, and brain trauma more specifically. In neurology, conventional scientific findings from neuroimaging, post-mortem brains, and animal studies (rat and mice brains, for instance) are prioritized, while contextual, political, subjective, and experiential knowledge are usually discounted, or deemed non-evidence. Yet, brain trauma and injuries are most obviously felt and embodied by those who sustain them. How might we consider "affective intensities" of trauma and injury in the neurosciences? In this paper I explore the ways in which attention to senses, the affective, and the ephemeral might challenge traditional forms of knowledge on injury, trauma, and the body. I consider the aesthetics and politics of knowledge (embodied, affective, performative, and situated knowledge) through the use of arts-based ethnography and sensorial methodologies (image, sound, performance). In thinking through brain injuries, memory loss and trauma, this project considers how (in Lauren Berlant’s words) “a sensing of history,” that is an attention to “affective intensities,” might produce a different type of ethnographic articulation, and counter dominant bioscientific renderings of brain injury (Berlant 2008: 4). By doing so this paper aims to advance understandings of affect and the sensorial in biomedical knowledge production, disturbing traditional evidentiary claims in neurology. I build on the work of feminist science studies scholars especially Barad (2007) and Haraway (1988) to think about the ways in which knowing is inseparable from modes of being (also see Schrader 2010). In this way, I approach the study of brain injury as a type of ‘situated neuroscience’ (Haraway 1988; Einstein 2012), where the embodied experiences of brain trauma matter to practices of knowing. This ethnographic approach, which explores both the lived account and laboratory scientific practices, is an attempt to get at the entanglements of the embodied matter of injured brains and the discursive practices of neurology and neurosciences more broadly.
Andrew Ryder - Situated mind, situated brain: An enactive perspective on disordered experience
Researchers working on culture and mental health have long considered the implications of cultural psychology's central claim, that mind and culture 'make each other up' (Shweder, 1990). More recently, this formulation has included the brain, such that culture, mind, and brain are understood as a single, interconnected system, a claim highly compatible with an enactive approach. In this paper, we first summarize philosophical treatments (e.g., de Haan, 2020; Maiese, 2022) of ‘enactive psychiatry’ while linking them to relevant findings from cultural- clinical psychology. Next, we explore applications of this approach in clinical practice. We focus on conditions of disordered experience that are conventionally understood as ‘brain disorders’ considering, in turn, schizophrenia, migraine, and dementia. To conclude, we argue that the distinction between mental and physical disorders is, at best, a shorthand and propose an alternative whereby 'disorder' is understood on a continuum along which feedback loops among culture, mind, and brain play increasingly prominent roles in addition to their individual contributions. Furthermore, sustained attention to these feedback loops and their patterned interactions becomes increasingly necessary as one progresses along this continuum. We suggest that such disorders are best studied and treated by interdisciplinary teams of scientist- practitioners trained to understand mind and brain as situated in cultural, historical, and environmental context.