Urte Laukaityte guest lecture on the philosophy of psychiatry

On 2 December at 14:15, Urte Laukaityte (UC Berkeley) will give a talk titled "Symptom Perception as Inference: The Scope of Functional Neurological Disorder" in Jakobi 2-336. Urte is completing her doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of psychiatry at UC Berkeley and is currently Prof. Dr. Theda Rehbock’s Philosophy Resident at Susimetsa Philosophicum. 

"Symptom Perception as Inference: The Scope of Functional Neurological Disorder"

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Various theories have been proposed to account for a functional neurological disorder, the historical legacy of which can be felt in the terminology that is still around (e.g., 'psychogenic,' 'psychosomatic,' 'dissociative'). 

I suggest that the most plausible cognitive model at present involves shifting our understanding of symptom perception as a reliable read-out of potential underlying disease processes and instead viewing it as a type of inferential decision-making in the cognitive system that is prone to bias and mismatch, as proposed by Van den Bergh and colleagues. 

What this means in practice is that various factors tend to influence the extent to which clinical symptoms reflect and track underlying disease in different patients at different times, including interindividual variability in personality traits (e.g., negative affectivity), personal history (e.g., trauma), cultural background (e.g., illness beliefs), contextual factors (e.g. stress), and the kinds of symptoms involved (e.g., fluctuating, multisystem, chronic). The inferential view of symptom experience accounts for the fact that, in most cases, there is a close enough coupling between the two while also allowing for the possibility of varying degrees of correspondence – at the far end of the spectrum lies functional neurological disorder with often extreme symptoms generated in the absence of physiological disease. 

This talk will explore just how far inferential symptom perception goes and what implications it yields for medical research as well as practice.

Külalisloengut korraldavad filsoofia osakond ja eetikakeskus koostöös Theda Rehbocki Susimetsa Philosophicumiga. 

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