•  41
    We routinely take diminished capacity as diminishing moral responsibility (as in the case of immaturity, senility, or particular mental impairments). The prospect of enhanced capacity therefore poses immediate questions with regard to moral responsibility. Of particular interest are those capacities that might allow us to better avoid serious harms or wrongdoing. We can consider questions of responsibility with regards to enhancement at various removes. In the first instance: where such (safe an…Read more
  •  99
    Despite growing understanding of the addictive qualities of the internet, and rising concerns about the effects of excessive internet use on personal wellbeing and mental health, the corresponding ethical debate is still in its infancy, and many of the relevant philosophical and conceptual frameworks are underdeveloped. Our goal in this chapter is to explore some of this evolving terrain. While there are unique ethical considerations that pertain to the formalisation of a disorder related to exc…Read more
  •  137
    Attentional Harms and Digital Inequalities
    JMIR Mental Health 9 (2). 2022.
    Recent years have seen growing public concern about the effects of persuasive digital technologies on public mental health and well-being. As the draws on our attention reach such staggering scales and as our ability to focus our attention on our own considered ends erodes ever further, the need to understand and articulate what is at stake has become pressing. In this ethical viewpoint, we explore the concept of attentional harms and emphasize their potential seriousness. We further argue that …Read more
  •  48
    Obtaining informed consent for genomics research in Africa: analysis of H3Africa consent documents
    with Nchangwi Syntia Munung, Patricia Marshall, Megan Campbell, Katherine Littler, Francis Masiye, Odile Ouwe-Missi-Oukem-Boyer, Janet Seeley, Paulina Tindana, and Jantina de Vries
    Journal of Medical Ethics 42 (2): 132-137. 2016.
    Background The rise in genomic and biobanking research worldwide has led to the development of different informed consent models for use in such research. This study analyses consent documents used by investigators in the H3Africa (Human Heredity and Health in Africa) Consortium. Methods A qualitative method for text analysis was used to analyse consent documents used in the collection of samples and data in H3Africa projects. Thematic domains included type of consent model, explanations of gene…Read more
  •  27
    Psychiatric Disorders Are Soft Natural Kinds
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 29 (3): 183-185. 2022.
    Tilmes concludes his interesting and informative piece with the sentence that “analysis of psychiatric vagueness merits further consideration.” I agree with this point, as well as with his earlier assertion that how one understands psychiatric vagueness may implicate the diagnostic model that one adopts, and the research that one pursues. Fortunately, there has been recent attention to vagueness in psychiatry, addressing both degree-vagueness and combinatorial vagueness. Vagueness in psychiatry …Read more
  •  3
    Applicability of a Novel Attunement Instrument and Its Relationship to Parental Sensitivity in Infants With and Without Visual Impairments
    with Victorita Stefania Vacaru, Andrea Urqueta Alfaro, Nadia Hoffman, Walter Wittich, Micky Stern, Heather J. Zar, and Paula Sophia Sterkenburg
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    This study investigated the applicability of a novel instrument to assess parent–child attunement in free play interactions, in dyads with an infant with and without visual impairments. We here report the findings on the reliability and applicability of the newly developed Attune & Stimulate Mother–Infant 56-items Instrument in two separate samples: one with infants with VI and one with typically sighted infants. In addition, we assessed the contribution of parental sensitivity to attunement in …Read more
  •  8
    Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science addresses philosophical questions related to problems of living, including questions about the nature of the brain-mind, reason and emotion, happiness and suffering, goodness and truth, and the meaning of life. It draws on critical, pragmatic, and embodied realism as well as moral naturalism, and brings arguments from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together with data from cognitive-affective scie…Read more
  •  11
    Sources of Stress and Their Associations With Mental Disorders Among College Students: Results of the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys International College Student Initiative
    with Eirini Karyotaki, Pim Cuijpers, Yesica Albor, Jordi Alonso, Randy P. Auerbach, Jason Bantjes, Ronny Bruffaerts, David D. Ebert, Penelope Hasking, Glenn Kiekens, Sue Lee, Margaret McLafferty, Arthur Mak, Philippe Mortier, Nancy A. Sampson, Gemma Vilagut, and Ronald C. Kessler
    Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
  •  19
    Cognitive Embodiment and Anxiety Disorders
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 27 (1): 53-55. 2020.
    Glas's article is one of several in an interesting special issue focused on applying concepts from enactivism to psychiatry; his focuses on anxiety in particular. Given ongoing developments in work on enactivism, and ongoing debates about how to progress psychiatry, this application is timely. Here, I make three general points about the application of enactivism to psychiatry; I exemplify these with occasional comments on social anxiety disorder.First, as de Haan notes in her introduction, the t…Read more
  • Global Mental Health and Neuroethics (edited book)
    with Ilina Singh
    Elsevier. 2020.
    Global Mental Health and Neuroethics explores conceptual, ethical and clinical issues that have emerged with the expansion of clinical neuroscience into middle- and low-income countries. Conceptual issues covered include avoiding scientism and skepticism in global mental health, integrating evidence-based and value-based global medicine, and developing a welfarist approach to the practice of global psychiatry. Ethical issues addressed include those raised by developments in neurogenetics, cosmet…Read more
  •  13
    Psychiatric genetic research investigates the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders with the aim of more effectively understanding, treating, or, ultimately, preventing such disorders. Given the challenges of recruiting research participants into such studies, the potential for long‐term benefits of such research, and seemingly minimal risk, a strong claim could be made that all non‐acute psychiatric inpatients, including forensic and involuntary patients, should be included in such research, p…Read more
  •  19
    Potential use of clinical polygenic risk scores in psychiatry – ethical implications and communicating high polygenic risk
    with A. C. Palk, S. Dalvie, J. de Vries, and A. R. Martin
    Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 14 (1): 1-12. 2019.
    Psychiatric disorders present distinct clinical challenges which are partly attributable to their multifactorial aetiology and the absence of laboratory tests that can be used to confirm diagnosis or predict risk. Psychiatric disorders are highly heritable, but also polygenic, with genetic risk conferred by interactions between thousands of variants of small effect that can be summarized in a polygenic risk score. We discuss four areas in which the use of polygenic risk scores in psychiatric res…Read more
  •  42
    Predictors of consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in a South African schizophrenia genomics study
    with Megan M. Campbell, Jantina de Vries, Sibonile G. Mqulwana, Michael M. Mndini, Odwa A. Ntola, Deborah Jonker, Megan Malan, Adele Pretorius, Zukiswa Zingela, Stephanus Van Wyk, and Ezra Susser
    BMC Medical Ethics 19 (1): 72. 2018.
    Cell line immortalisation is a growing component of African genomics research and biobanking. However, little is known about the factors influencing consent to cell line creation and immortalisation in African research settings. We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring three questions in a sample of Xhosa participants recruited for a South African psychiatric genomics study: First, what proportion of participants consented to cell line storage? Second, what were predictors of this conse…Read more
  •  50
    Psychopharmacological enhancement: a conceptual framework
    Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 7 5. 2012.
    The availability of a range of new psychotropic agents raises the possibility that these will be used for enhancement purposes (smart pills, happy pills, and pep pills). The enhancement debate soon raises questions in philosophy of medicine and psychiatry (eg, what is a disorder?), and this debate in turn raises fundament questions in philosophy of language, science, and ethics. In this paper, a naturalistic conceptual framework is proposed for addressing these issues. This framework begins by c…Read more
  •  19
    Ethical Challenges in Contemporary FASD Research and Practice
    with Nina di Pietro, Jantina de Vries, Angelina Paolozza, Dorothy Reid, James N. Reynolds, Amy Salmon, Marsha Wilson, and Judy Illes
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 25 (4): 726-732. 2016.
  •  26
    Psychiatric Genomics: Ethical Implications for Public Health in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries
    with Ilina Singh, Dorcas Kamuya, and Jantina de Vries
    American Journal of Bioethics 17 (4): 17-19. 2017.
  •  29
    Normal and Abnormal Anxiety in the Age of DSM-5 and ICD-11
    with Randolph M. Nesse
    Emotion Review 7 (3): 223-229. 2015.
    Despite the effort on DSM-5 and ICD-11, few appear satisfied with these classification systems. We suggest that the core reason for dissatisfaction is expecting too much from them; they do not provide discrete categories that map to specific causes of disease, they describe clinical syndromes intended to guide treatment choices. Here we review work on anxiety and anxiety disorders to argue that while clinicians draw a pragmatic distinction between normal and abnormal emotions based on considerat…Read more
  •  33
    Revenge and forgiveness in the New South Africa
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1): 37-38. 2013.
    Insofar as South Africa underwent a rapid transformation from apartheid to democracy, it may provide a unique laboratory for investigating aspects of revenge and forgiveness. Here we suggest that observations and data from South Africa are partially consistent with the hypotheses generated by MCullough and colleagues. At the same time, the rich range of revenge and forgiveness phenomena in real-life settings is likely to require explanatory concepts other than specialized modules and their compu…Read more
  •  13
    Psychopharmacology - a remarkable development -- Philosophical questions raised by psychopharmacology -- How to think about science, language, and medicine : classical, critical, and integrated perspectives -- Conceptual questions about psychotropics -- Explanatory questions about psychotropics -- Moral questions about psychotropics.
  •  91
    Sadistic cruelty and unempathic evil: Psychobiological and evolutionary considerations
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (3): 242-242. 2006.
    Understanding the origins of evil behaviour is one of our most important intellectual tasks. A distinction can perhaps be drawn between overt sadistic cruelty and the lack of empathy to suffering that is a hallmark of evil. There is increasing data available on the prevalence, proximal psychobiological underpinnings, and distal evolutionary basis for these contrasting phenomena.
  •  16
    Disorder and Deviance: Where to Draw the Boundaries?
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21 (3): 261-265. 2014.
    Last updated - 2020-01-06.
  •  332
    Philosophy of psychopharmacology
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 41 (2): 200-211. 1998.
  •  19
    A Neural Network Approach to Obsessive- Compulsive Disorder
    with Eric Hollander
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 15 (3): 223-238. 1994.
    A central methodological innovation in cognitive science has been the development of connectionist or neural network models of psychological phenomena. These models may also comprise a theoretically integrative and methodologically rigorous approach to psychiatric phenomena. In this paper we employ connectionist theory to conceptualize obsessive-compulsive disorder . We discuss salient phenomenological and neurobiological findings of the illness, and then reformulate these using neural network m…Read more
  •  7
    Natural philosophy once spanned the fields of philosophy, science, and medicine. Scientific disciplines and medical specialties have rapidly achieved independence, and the availability of the internet and open-access publishing promises a further expansion of knowledge. Nevertheless, a consideration of the grounding concepts and ethical principles that underlie health care remains paramount. It is timely, therefore, to contribute to the global conversation on health care with an open-access jour…Read more