Cancelled - Science Cafe: "Self-disease ambiguity in psychiatry: what do and don't my mental health problems say about me?''

On the one hand, being yourself seems like the easiest thing there is: you just naturally are yourself, right? But there can also be situations in which it is not at all clear what it means to be yourself; situations in which, for example, you wonder what you actually want, or think, or should do yourself. Perhaps even more complicated is when you wonder whether you can trust yourself completely, to what extent your own judgments or your own feelings are 'appropriate': or whether perhaps they say more about yourself than about the situation at hand. 'Am I feeling crappy now or is the situation crappy? And do the medications make me feel fake or real right now?' For my research, I interviewed people with recurrent depression about their relationship to their depression and medication. During the science café I will talk about some of the outcomes of this research.

Sanneke de Haan is Socrates Professor of Psychiatry and Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Associate Professor of Bioethics and Ethics of Health at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. She works on topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. Her current research project "Is it me or my disorder?" focuses on self-disease ambiguity in patients with recurrent depression, and the development of a notion of relational authenticity. Her book on Enactive Psychiatry was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.