Lisa Bortolotti

Understood in their historical context, current debates about psychiatric classification, prompted by the publication of the DSM-5, open up new opportunities for improved translational research in psychiatry. In this paper, we draw lessons for translational research from three time slices of 20th century psychiatry. From the first time slice, 1913 and the publication of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology, the lesson is that translational research in psychiatry requires a pluralistic approach encompassing equally the sciences of mind (including the social sciences) and of brain. From the second time slice, 1953 and a conference in New York from which our present symptom-based classifications are derived, the lesson is that, while reliability remains the basis of psychiatry as an observational science, validity too is essential to effective translation. From the third time slice, 1997 and a conference on psychiatric classification in Dallas that brought together patients and carers with researchers and clinicians, the lesson is that we need to build further on collaborative models of research combining expertise-by-training with expertise-by-experience. This is important if we are to meet the specific challenges to translation presented by the complexity of the concept of mental disorder, particularly as reflected in the diversity of desired treatment outcomes. Taken together, these three lessons – a pluralistic approach, reliability and validity, and closer collaboration – provide an emerging framework for more effective translation of research into practice in 21st century psychiatry.

Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation

This is a collection of Paul Churchland's recent essays which have in common an overarching research programme aimed at identifying the scope and the importance of the contributions that neuroscience has made and will make to philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, epistemology and metaphysics. The general structure of many of the essays included in the collection is as follows: there is a long-standing problem in the philosophical literature which has escaped not only a convincing solution but also a straightforward analysis of what the solution should look like, and how it could be achieved. Then the neurosciences start addressing a relevantly connected problem, or progress in such a way as to make a difference to our understanding of the original problem, and now a solution is in sight or, at least, we know roughly what the solution should look like.The way in which Churchland presents and defends his research programme in the essays included in the collection is praiseworthy for at least two reasons. First, Churchland's attempt to argue for the relevance of cognitive neurobiology for long-standing philosophical problems is seemingly effortless, which is a very rare …