Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

The Phenomenon Of False Memory And Its Correlation To Mental Health, Kelsey Christianson

D.U.Quark

Memory has always been important for humans. Whether it is remembering the location of one’s car in a crowded parking lot or giving an eye-witness testimony, memory is instrumental in every part of society. False memory is a situation where one incorrectly believes or recalls an event. This review is about false memory and how mental disorders may or may not increase the capacity for false memory. Previous studies have found correlations between false memory and specific mental health disorders. Additional research is needed in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance abuse, and schizophrenia. The benefits of future research …

How Does Information Overload Through News Consumption Impact Users’ Mental State?, Agaretha Kosasih

D.U.Quark

With the rise of technology and its accessibility, people have an increased ability to access information, which consequently escalates the chances to be more prone to information overload. However, despite the frequent use of technology and the internet, there is still a lack of awareness about the effects of information overload. One issue that arises in discussing information overload is the abundant research that confirms the negative impacts compared to those that provide positive solutions for the issue. This review discusses the way information overload impacts our mental health through our cognitive processes, influencing our mental state, and examines our …

Cognitive Neuropsychology Of Autism, Attention- Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders And The Role That Neurodivergence Plays On Social Skills, Cognition And Behavior., Madison Mckee

D.U.Quark

Many studies have investigated how structural abnormalities directly affect the brain, but few have sought to understand the experience of living with neurodivergence. Two common neurodivergent disorders, Autism and ADHD, result from an abnormal development in the frontal lobe, caudate and corpus callosum. Disruptions in these areas have inhibitory effects on behavior and nerve signaling which results in deficits in executive functioning and Theory of Mind (ToM). The presence of these disruptions provides evidence that neurodevelopmental conditions are as physical as they are enduring. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the cognitive and behavioral deficits of Autism and …

Tabletop Role-Playing Games As Autism Psychotherapy: A Video-Cued Multivocal Clinical Ethnography, Adina Rubin-Budick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study is a video-cued multivocal ethnography that analyzed the clinical reasoning and perspectives of psychotherapists using Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPG) as a therapeutic treatment for children and adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum conditions. With a growing number of TRPG therapists nationwide using this modality in their clinical practices, this study aimed to develop a clearer understanding of the ways in which their therapeutic orientation, gaming practices, and knowledge of Autism Spectrum Conditions informs their use of TRPG psychotherapy with Autistic clients.

Research that focuses on clinical decision-making and the knowledge that informs clinical interventions and technique generally refers …

The Relationship Between Urban Green Space Perception And Use Within The Adolescent Population: A Focused Ethnography, Rachel Lyons

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Greenspace is beneficial for improving adolescent mental health, yet we still do not understand the connection between the built environment and subjective mental wellbeing. We also lack understanding of how this population uses greenspace and how they feel when in it. Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was threefold: to understand why adolescents use greenspace, to identify how they use greenspace, and to explore how they feel when they are in greenspace. Methods: participated in a focused ethnography that utilized auto photography for photo elicitation. Braun and Clark's (2006), six phases of thematic analysis were used to guide …

The Purple Heart And Suicidal Behaviors In Post-9/11 U.S. Army Combat Veterans With A Traumatic Brain Injury: A Mixed Methods Study, Jayna Moceri-Brooks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Military suicide rates remain high, despite years of targeted efforts to prevent suicide. Specifically, Army Combat Veterans who sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) while deployed in support of the Global War on Terrorism are at the highest risk for suicide. This dissertation highlights possible causes for suicidal behaviors within this unique group and provides specific military suicide prevention recommendations. The dissertation is organized into three publishable manuscripts: The first manuscript (Chapter 1) is a mixed-methods dissertation research proposal written according to the National Institute of Health proposal guidelines. The second manuscript (Chapter 2) is an integrative review of the …

Emergency Care For Youth Who Experience Suicidality And Identify As Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer/Questioning (Lgbtq+): An Interpretive Phenomenology, Theresa Schultz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: Suicide is a leading cause of death in children; youth who identify as LGBTQ+ are at an exponentially higher risk of suicide. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of young adults who identify as LGBTQ+ and sought emergency care for suicidality when they were adolescents.

Methods: Heideggerian hermeneutics phenomenology is the research method used in this study. Youth, ages 18-25 years, who identify as LGBTQ+ and sought emergency treatment for suicidality when they were adolescents (13-17 years) were recruited to participate;fifteen youth enrolled. Individuals ranged in age from 20 to 25 years. Participants described …

The Lived Experience Of Second Victim Crnas, Michael Neft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A second victim is a health care provider who has been involved in a critical event. A

critical event is a clinical situation in which an unforeseen clinical outcome occurs, or

the clinical deterioration of the patient takes place for many different reasons. The

patient and his/her family are the first victims. The health care provider(s) involved in

the event are second victims. After such an event, the healthcare provider may

experience a constellation of negative emotions, such as guilt, sadness, depression,

somatic symptoms, hypervigilance, and fear. Most second victims require support to

cope with the adverse clinical situation. Second …

A Life Lived With Schizophrenia: When Mother’S Love Is Kept In The Dark Exploring Maternal Communication And Attachment Organization In Families With Schizophrenia, Myrsini Stefanidou Marini

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, research into the transgenerational transmission of attachment styles has shown that a mother’sattachment style often predicts the attachment style of her infant. Fearsome parental behavior has been found to predict disorganized attachment in infants, which is further associated with a range of mental health disturbances in adolescence. Furthermore, regular patterns of disturbed communication between mother and child have also been found to lead to ‘schizophrenic’ thinking and behavior in the child’s life. While acknowledging that genetic and other biological factors contribute to the emergence of schizophrenia, this study focused on disorganized attachment and disturbed communication between mother …

Dancing With 4e Cognitive Science And Human Science Psychology, Joshua Hall

Middle Voices

According to the “Embodied Cognition” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the three landmark texts in the 4E cognitive science tradition are Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, and Andy Clark’s Being There. In my first section, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of these three texts, identifying recuring affirmations of the figure of dance alongside explicit marginalization of the practice of dance, perhaps in part due to cognitive science’s overemphasis on cognition to the exclusion of affect. In my second section, drawing on my previous interpretations of proto-affect theorists …

When “There Is” A Black: Levinas And Fanon On Ethics, Politics, And Responsibility, Leswin Laubscher

Middle Voices

This paper examines some of the ways in which the Black other, by Frantz Fanon’s articulation, complicates and challenges Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies of ethics and justice. Additionally, it brings Levinas’s notion of the il y a, or “there is,” and Fanon’s “zone of nonbeing” into critical conversation with respect to the body and being of the Black other.

Emannuel Levinas, Fr. William Richardson, And The Return Of The Irresponsible Subject, Robert Manning

Middle Voices

This article revisits the famous encounter between Levinas and William Richardson to discuss the subject's ability to return to itself despite Levinas's arguments to the the contrary in OTB.

Ethics Of Interaction: Levinas And Enactivism On Affectivity, Responsibility, And Signification, Edward A. Lenzo

Middle Voices

In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to connect enactivism with the work of Emmanuel Levinas. This essay is such an attempt. Its major theme is the relationship between affectivity and ethics. My touchstones in enactivist thought are Giovanna Colombetti and Steve Torrances’ “Emotion and Ethics: an (inter-)enactive account” (2009) and the influential concept of participatory sense-making developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2007). With respect to Levinas, I deploy major insights from Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I first show that enactivist thought (thus represented) and Levinas roughly agree on …

Revealing Levinas: Transcending Moral And Aesthetic Distinctions Between Form And Content Through Poetic Gamespersonship, Lori E. Koelsch, Alex Kranjec

Middle Voices

This poem was inspired by the confluence of two communications: An email regarding proposed changes to university workload policies, and a call for papers for a journal’s special issue on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. We used poetic form to reflect figuratively on academic integrity and what counts literally as good Levinas scholarship.

Ethics In The Breakdown: Levinas, Winnicott, And Schizoid Phenomena, Matthew J. Devine

Middle Voices

This article addresses the common concern that Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics amounts to a life-denying, moral masochism. To the contrary, I demonstrate close resonances between Levinas’ project and that of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, for whom the purpose of therapy is to feel alive. In the first section, I trace the Levinasian subject’s coming to be out of the impersonal Il y a. Exploiting the object-relations undertones, I emphasize that the Levinasian subject comes to be as fastened, riveted, or bound to existence, and thereafter seeks to loosen its bond to its existence. In the second section, I discuss Winnicott’s …

King, Levinas And The Interruption Of Love: The Alchemy Of The Fire Fable, Claire S. Lebeau, Kaleb Sinclair

Middle Voices

Levinas begins Totality and Infinity with a haunting allusion from the 19^th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, “though the true life is absent”, we are in the world. This lamentation is a fitting beginning for his exposition of a radical reformulation of an Ethics that precedes all thought, language, or systematic attempts to cast morality as a Truth. Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. presented a lamentation for a dream of a world where the transcendence of race, creed, or classification of any kind could allow children to grow up to be first ethical human beings in relation to one …

In Memoriam: George Kunz (1934-2019) / Levinas Issue Introduction, Claire S. Lebeau

Middle Voices

No abstract provided.

Experience Beyond The Imaginary: Reading Freud’S “Elisabeth Von R.” With Lacan’S “The Mirror Stage”, Jeffrey Mccurry

Middle Voices

While many read Lacan as a structuralist who sought to overthrow the authority of first-person conscious experience, his work also has resonances and affinities with a broadly phenomenological approach to psychoanalysis. This connection comes into focus when we bring Lacan’s concept of the imaginary stage into dialogue with Freud’s early work on hysteria. Lacan implied that the imaginary stage, while necessary for human development, nevertheless frustrates a significant dimension of being human, viz. the human being’s internally conflictual and contradictory experience that calls into question the very idea of a unified self or subject. When we read the early Freud’s …

The Masochian Woman: A Fantasy Of Male Desire?, Jennifer Komorowski Ms.

Middle Voices

The Masochian woman is a figure who stages what is at stake for women when desire and the law come together. This requires an examination of the conflict that exists between the idea that women’s masochism is the fantasy of men and the truth about who wields power in the masochistic theatre. Thus, the inquiry into women’s masochism means following Jacques Lacan’s conception of women’s masochism in Anxiety, which describes it as holding a “completely different meaning, a fairly ironic meaning, and a completely different scope” from the pervert’s masochism or moral masochism (Lacan, 2016, p.190). Beginning with a critical …

Jacques Lacan’S "Signification Of The Phallus" And The Photography Of Robert Mapplethorpe, D. Michael Jones

Middle Voices

The recent exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, “Implicit Tension” (January 25–July 10, 2019), at the Guggenheim, explores the artist’s obsession with the magical, the demonic, and the unveiled phallus. It is Mapplethorpe’s artistic obsessions, personified in the photographs of the X, Y, and Z Portfolios, as well as the deeply homophobic response his photography, even his name, evoke twenty years after his death, that make this recent exhibit an ideal space to reencounter key concepts from Jacques Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus” in Écrits. For as Lacan (2002) points out “the phallus is the signifier of this very Aufhebung [sublation], …

Signifiers Still Matter: The Relevance Of "On An Ex Post Facto Syllabary" For Therapy Today, Yael Goldman Baldwin

Middle Voices

No abstract provided.

From Case Study As Symptom To Case Study As Sinthome: Engaging Lacan And Irigaray On "Thinking In Cases" As Psychoanalytic Pedagogy, Erica Freeman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation accomplishes two goals. First, this dissertation articulates a Lacanian account of the epistemological and historical presuppositions of the psychoanalytic case study genre, while engaging reflexively with extant Foucauldian scholarship on this genre as well as feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray’s criticisms of Lacan. Irigaray’s critique is engaged in order to tarry with its implications for a Lacanian approach to the psychoanalytic case study genre. Second, this dissertation critically examines the significance of Lacan’s (re)reading, in Seminar V, of Joan Riviere’s (1929) “Womanliness as Masquerade” in the midst of his oral teachings on the psychoanalytic concepts of castration and …

Without Words: Relational Neuropsychology And Creative Arts Therapies With People Managing Aphasia, Autumn Marie Chilcote

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aphasia describes the broad experience of disrupted language production or comprehension acquired after structural changes in the brain. These changes, usually associated with stroke, tumor, or cortical degeneration, are often co-occurring with other symptoms, such as emotional dysregulation, partial paralysis, and difficult social, occupational, and community relationships. Common approaches to research and rehabilitation with persons managing aphasia highlight conversation and semantic retrieval, with a lack in literature considering the diversity of symptoms and responses. Questions arise as to the ways that psychotherapies, typically language- centered, can be adapted to collaborative, low-verbal approaches that attend to the range of individual symptoms …

“I Do Have A Softer Side”: A Phenomenological Investigation Of The Prisoner-Dog Relationship In The Canine Partners For Life Training Program, Kathleen Kocherzat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study investigated the relationship between incarcerated dog handlers and the service dogs they trained. Six men at a large northeastern prison were interviewed during the summer of 2017; all were current or former dog trainers in the Canine Partners for Life (CPL) training program. The men were serving prison sentences ranging anywhere from several years to life without parole. The interviews focused on their lived experience, rasing and training puppies for a period up to eighteen months. The qualitative data consisted of approximately thirteen hours of transcribed interviews, which were then interpreted using the phenomenological psychological method developed …

The Myth Of Promiscuity: Examining Black Male Sexual Narratives And Sexual Identity, Seth Young

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Black masculinity and sexuality are common topics across areas of philosophy, psychology, cultural studies and others. Yet, these topics are dedicated to the racial narrative of hypersexual Black male, the sexual objectification of Black men, and their presumed promiscuity. While such topics are important, there is little qualitative research that looks at the complexity and emotionality of African American men’s sexual experiences. Using the theoretical research on black masculinity and sexuality as its backdrop, this dissertation explores how heterosexual, African American men experience their sexuality. The study incorporates narrative inquiry and in-depth, semi-structured interviews to gather stories of five African …

The Association Between Medication Adherence In Mental Illness And Substance Use Disorder Relapse In Patients With Dual Diagnosis, Tyler Dunn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The aims of the study were to (1) identify personal, social, and clinical history for patients with substance use disorder (SUD) and mental illness, (2) measure agreeance between patient self-report versus facility record history for mental illness, substance abuse, and psychotropic medication, (3) investigate the specific role of medication adherence and barriers to use for psychotropic medications upon SUD relapse, and (4) assess follow-up changes in mental illness severity and medication adherence in dual diagnosis patients enrolled in a substance abuse rehabilitation program.

Methods: The pilot study utilized a mixed methodology. Inclusion criteria included male patients at least 18 …

The Logic Of Sexuation In Deleuze And Lacan, Matthew Lovett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan, I argue for an account of sexual difference that responds to a tension in feminist philosophy, namely, the problem of the ontological status of the sexed body. In so doing, I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I argue that, rather than being antithetical, the two can be productively read together, in particular with regard to this very question. Ultimately basing my reading in the Deleuzian passive syntheses and dynamic geneses of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as in Lacan’s twentieth …

The Safety And Efficacy Of Ondansetron In The Treatment Of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Rebecca Stark

Graduate Student Research Symposium

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by recurrent intrusive thoughts (obsessions) that cause significant anxiety and distress, leading to repetitive behaviors (compulsions) that an individual feels driven to perform. The symptoms of OCD can range from mild to so severe that it can be incapacitating to an individual’s life. Treatment is often prescribed, including both pharmacological and behavioral therapy. Overall, 70% of patients starting treatment experience a significant improvement; however, there is still a portion of patients with severe OCD that do not respond to first and second-line treatment plans. We present the case of a 62-year-old-male …

A Systems Approach To Moral Distress In Long Term Care, Margaret Lemley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract: The question that this dissertation seeks to answer is whether or not a Systems Approach to Moral Distress can serve to positively address issues of moral distress within the Long-Term Care setting. Because moral distress has largely been understood as a phenomenon of the individual, efforts to address and reduce incidents of moral distress have focused almost entirely on the individual and his or her reaction to specific triggers. Building upon the existing literature this dissertation argues that previous efforts to understand moral distress within the healthcare setting have been limiting in two very important aspects. The first …

Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This cross-disciplinary dissertation provides a missing intellectual history of an ostensibly dead idea. Once widely held and no less elegant for its obsolescence, the principle of biogenetic recapitulation is best remembered by its defining mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Among psychologists and sociologists as well as embryologists, the notion that the development of any individual organism repeats in compressed, miniaturized form the entire history of its species enjoyed broad (if not uncontested) acceptance through the early twentieth century. The author reexamines the origins of this theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, and traces its influence in psychology …