Rethinking Schizophrenia: Neuroscience, phenomenology, and finding ourselves in the gaze of madness Dr Clara Humpston, Department of Psychology
Event details
York Drug Science Society Lecture
When we think, how do we know that our thoughts are truly our own? What happens if someone suffers a break or detachment from the common-sensical notions of reality? Symptoms of schizophrenia frequently challenge, if not destroy, our everyday notions of reality and even our sense of self. Indeed, the very name of schizophrenia often strikes fear and aversion in those unaffected by it, and its sufferers are stigmatised as beyond human understanding or societal acceptance.
In this talk, Dr Clara Humpston will draw from neuroscience, pharmacology, and philosophy of psychiatry to present the science behind the main symptoms of schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses, and she will consider whether their symptoms are necessarily all that distant or different from the daily experiences of reality that are often taken for granted by the rest of us.
About the speaker
With a background in both psychopharmacology and psychiatric research methods, Clara Humpston was awarded her PhD on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of schizotypy and first episode psychosis in Professor David Linden’s lab from Cardiff University in February 2018, focusing on predictive processing and source monitoring frameworks. She began her first postdoctoral position in 2017 at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London working on chronotherapeutics for the rapid treatment of depression, before taking up a post of Research Fellow at the Institute of Mental Health, University of Birmingham in 2019. She joined the Department of Psychology as a Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of York in April 2022.