Poetry in Psychiatry

OBJECTIVE: To reflect on the importance of teaching formulation skills in psychiatry training and explore how creative writing, particularly writing poetry, can help achieve this goal. CONCLUSIONS: It is vital that formulation skills are embedded throughout psychiatry training. Formulations have an artistic element, and writing poetry can help foster a capacity for curiosity that can assist trainees in developing these skills.

This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of interactive television-based music, art, and poetry therapies in reducing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder among school children who have experienced abduction. A randomized control trial was adopted using school children from three selected secondary schools in Northern Nigeria that have experienced the issue of kidnapping. The treatment is characterized by (1) group setting, (2) TV instruction (3) school collaboration, and (4) use of artistic mediation...

To work in a hospital is to believe in poetry, to grasp with wonder all the details that tie each person to an existence. However far-fetched they may be, they also contribute to enriching our belief in a world that can always be rewritten beyond the determinisms that would claim to assign tragedy.

This article examines the presence and influence of the work of Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and existential analysis ( Daseinsanalyse ) in Spanish psychiatry in the central decades of the 20th century. First, and drawing on various printed and archival sources, it reconstructs the important personal and professional ties that Binswanger maintained with numerous Spanish colleagues and describes the notable dissemination of his work in Spain through bibliographical reviews, scientific events, academic reports, university lectures and translations...

There is increasing recognition of the importance of the humanities and arts in medical and psychiatric training. We explore the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and its evocations of depression through themes of mood, time and self-consciousness and discuss their relation to images of 'spleen', the 'snuffling clock' and the 'sinister mirror'. Following the literary critical commentaries of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Jean Starobinski (1920-2019) we identify some of their roots in the poet's experience of the rapid and alienating urbanisation of 19th-century Paris...

The main purpose of this article is to draw the attention of its readers to Charlotte Mew, a poet who is not well-known but whose work should be of great interest to mental health clinicians. She lived most of her life in the shadow of mental illness. Her poetry provides penetrating insights into her experiences of this in herself and in members of her family.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

In this article we reconsider Homer's poetry in the light of modern achievements in neuroscience. This perspective offers some clues for examining specific patterns of brain functioning. Homer's epics, for instance, painted a synthetic picture of the human body, emphasizing some parts and neglecting others. This led to the formation of a body schema reminiscent of a homunculus, which we call the "Homeric homunculus." Both poems were largely the product of centuries of oral tradition, in which the prodigious memory of courtly rhapsodists was essential to the performance of the epics...

OBJECTIVES: Art and cultural activities can benefit mental health. However, there is insufficient evidence on active engagement in art and cultural activities for preventing depressive symptoms among older adults. Therefore, we examined the association of active engagement in art and cultural activities with depressive symptom onset among older adults using 3-year longitudinal data. METHODS: This longitudinal study recruited non-institutionalised older adults independent in daily living from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study (JAGES) established in 2010, and those without depressive symptoms were followed for three years...

The medical humanities may offer an antidote to the unconscious depersonalisation of patients into clinical variables and diagnoses at the hands of physicians, cultivating a patient-centred and individual approach to the management of both physical and mental health conditions. The emphasis on the person behind the diagnosis helps physicians to remain motivated and compassionate in the face of increasing social and organisational pressures that threaten this human connection. As a doctor and the relative of a patient with dementia, I reflect on the way in which poetry has helped to translate my experience as a relative into improving my own practice as a doctor...

This article is a narrative and conceptual exploration of the journey towards practicing Indigenous allyship in an academic context. I begin by tracing a trajectory of coming to work with Indigenous peoples as a non-Indigenous, multiple migrant, and queer person of color situated as a therapist and educator in a Canadian academic institution's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Anti-racist and de/postcolonial theories and concepts abound to label my experiences of tokenization, yet they invariably fall short of the nuanced and complex ways that both reconciliation and oppression unfold in the everyday...

In the beginning of modern Neurology, between the 19th and the 20th centuries, neurologists often assumed simultaneous positions of intellectual prominence and gained significant cultural credentials. Not only observers and admirers of music, literature, and the fine arts, many neurologists and neuroscientists worldwide developed significant cultural careers. When studying the careers and lives of the founders of Brazilian Neurology, one finds only sparse information on their cultural activities, which are often relegated to side notes...

Depictions of pandemics presented through the lens of literary authors and poets have everlasting power. In this article, we explore the psychosocial impact of pandemics, as presented through literature and poetry, and attempt to draw similarities with the current COVID-19 pandemic. We explore topics such as fear and anxiety, hopelessness, and suicide ideation. Overall, the psychological devastation caused by epidemics has influenced many major writers and will undoubtedly impact the writers of our generation...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The coronavirus crisis occurs at a time when many clinicians have already experienced burnout. One in three Irish doctors were suffering from burnout in the 2019 National Study of Wellbeing of Hospital Doctors in Ireland; rates are also high in Irish Psychiatry. We present a perspective on the use of narrative in medicine and recognise that storytelling, and the patient history are very much at the heart of medicine. Clinician storytelling, such as Schwartz Rounds and Balint group work, has very much come to the fore in Irish Psychiatry and in training...

In recent years, both fields of physics and psychology have made important scientific advances. The emergence of new instruments gave rise to a data-driven neuroscience allowing us to learn about the state of the brain supporting known mental functions and conversely. In parallel, the appearance of new mathematics allowed the development of computational models describing fundamental brain functions and implementing them in technological applications. While emphasizing the methodology of physics, the special issue aims to bring together these trends in both the experimental and theoretical sciences in order to explain some of the most basic mental processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and learning...

The roots of confessionalism reach back to the early Middle Ages and to the Confessions of Rousseau. Confessional literature gained a theoretical foundation in the age of Romanticism, then in the 20th century the genre underwent a revival and late modernisation in the works of the "confessional poets" (Lowell, Sexton, Plath etc.). The literary studies and psychobiographical examination of these authors threw light on the psychiatric aspects of confessionalism; most of them suffered from psychiatric or addictive disorders and committed suicide...

OBJECTIVE: Janet Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's most celebrated authors. Much of her work stems from her experiences as a psychiatric patient. She was hospitalised for about eight years with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Treatments included insulin coma therapy and unmodified electroconvulsive therapy. Her doctors then planned for her to have a leucotomy, which was cancelled upon discovery that one of her works had won a prestigious literary award. She subsequently moved to England and was assessed at the Maudsley Hospital by Sir Aubrey Lewis...

Augusto dos Anjos, from Paraíba, Brazil, occupies a singular place in Brazilian literature, defying alignment with any one literary style. His poetry is marked by anguished verse, by existential dimensions and a vocabulary replete with scientific terms. His work is of great interest to neuropsychiatry, not just for the abundance of related terms, but also because it reflects conceptions from neuroscience at the turn of the twentieth century. This study focuses on his literary output from a dual perspective: by identifying how his poetry reflects the organicist tendency in psychiatry at the time, as generally personified in the figure of Emil Kraepelin, and by exploring the ideological content of the work, like the Darwinist perspective and the tension between dualism and materialistic monism...

BACKGROUND: In forensic psychiatric care, a hermeneutic caring conversation between caregivers and patients can improve health outcomes. The hermeneutic approach entails starting from the whole and involves openness for what is shown as well as paying attention to the different parts. One way to deepen these conversations is to take advantage of both the caregivers' and the patients' life experiences. RESEARCH QUESTIONS: The purpose of the study is to discuss and reflect on what hermeneutic caring conversations can mean for a deepened understanding of the movement in the health processes of patients in forensic care, patients who are in deep suffering...