The Pace of Petie Is Not a Mental Hospital

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i think most people have an image of a mental hospital that comes out of one flew over the cuckoo's nest, which was kenkes's attempt to show we have a problem here. These places are pretty grim. It wasn't a mental hospital. Thepaceof petie is one of the largest hospitals in europe, if not the largest one. And this was just one unit within the centre for the study of nervous system with lots of different departments - almost like a university campus really.

Shermer and Arikha discuss: what it means for a mind to be disrupted • dementia, senility, and Alzheimer’s disease • mental illness and the labeling problem • the social construction of mental illness • neurology and psychiatry • agency and volition • memory and amnesia • autobiographical memory • self and embodied self • brain modularity • brain as a machine • emotions and cognition: bodily changes first then the awareness of the emotion • conversion disorder/hysteria • depression • metacognition: thinking about thinking • exteroception and interoception.

Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. The author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, she is associate fellow of the Warburg Institute and honorary fellow of the Center for the Politics of Feelings, London, and research associate at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. She is based in Florence, Italy.