Nottingham Conference Whoopsy Daisy

Foreword to the following report: I have discussed an unfortunate encounter between Thomas Kabir and I on Thursday evening, 21st May when he was sitting, unsuspecting, at a dinner table and I appeared, three sheets to the wind and sat down beside him (see below). My subjective experience and reflections around and from this encounter are relayed in both of my blogs.

Consequently, since I have no knowledge of Thomas Kabir whatever outside of the brief meeting I had with him at the Conference, my comments can only be seen as an index of my own generic concerns and issues. Nothing I say can or should be taken to reflect on Thomas Kabir in anyway whatsoever. Any appearance of such reflection should be dismissed as misleading. Thanks.

Last week I spent a couple of days in Nottingham for the MHRN Scientific Conference (organised by Thomas Kabir I was given to understand by someone or another..). The event was well attended by experts by experience as well as experts by profession amongst the delegate group, whilst the speakers were overwhelmingly selected for their professional expertise predominantly as psychiatrists from Kings College and from the Institute of Psychiatry (both in London).

There was plenty of attention to quantitative data analysis and statistical probability factors, to neuro-imaging and to psycho-pharmacology and a certain amount of language use that couldn't reasonably be interpreted other than as inadvertently reinforcing stigmatising and redundant intellectual frameworks.

I noticed the prevalent references to terms such as 'disease', 'cognitive impairment', 'loss of grey matter' and so forth and an approving reference (indeed 2 approving references) to Kraepelin offered in the first case in selective and frankly distorting contextualisation.

One speaker, whose name escapes me but reminded me of the word Shit (quite wrong by the way; but I'll correct it in next posting and you'll understand the shorthand memory jogger I gave myself) was particularly interesting; I couldn't regard his position as other than predominantly medical model but his thinking appeared subtle and intelligently tentative: what a very welcome breeze in a largely unimaginative community of interests.

One of the most infuriating aspects of much research that is being pursued is that in itself the research subject matter is not uninteresting yet the inflections of priority and value base informing such research and the circles of conversational network within which such research develops and continues, removes from it the more interesting potentials for interdisciplinery dialogue and productivity that its funding might justify.

Instead of becoming exciting it is excitably protected inside intellectually sterile frameworks. Still, there are reasons to be cheerful, we kept being told and so (dum dum dum) let's keep smiling and keeping the faith (wink)

In a somewhat inebriated condition I approached Thomas Kabir at the Conference Dinner and confronted him with my concerns about the selection of speakers (as said above, very high proportion of psychiatric academics, a sprinkling of psychologists and one expert by experience co-presenting with an academic) and the weighting of biological and pathologising interpretations of mental health distresses and disturbances. He didn’t seem delighted with me.

He seemed even less delighted with me the following morning when I sensed his aversion to my presence. I made a decision to approach him and apologise to him for my rudeness the previous evening. My rudeness as I recall consisted of an attempt to encourage him to take me seriously by pointing out that I was old enough to be his mother. It was an inappropriate effort to give myself leverage to equality of speaker status with him.