About
72
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Introduction
I have now joined the Department of Psychology as a Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of York, following my position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Previously I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. My research topics and interests to date include prediction error, source-monitoring, self-referential processing and ego-disturbances in schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2019 - April 2022
December 2017 - April 2019
November 2012 - September 2014
Education
October 2014 - November 2017
September 2011 - September 2012
October 2007 - July 2011
Publications
Publications (72)
People with schizophrenia have deficits in retrieving the source of memory information. Research has focused on two types of judgements: reality monitoring (discriminating internally-generated stimuli from external information) and internal source monitoring (distinguishing two different internal sources). The aim of the current study was to assess...
Patients with psychotic disorders experience a range of reality distortions. These often include auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVHs), and thought insertion (TI) to a lesser degree; however, their mechanisms and relationships between each other remain largely elusive. Here we attempt to establish a integrative model drawing from the phenomenology...
Background
One in three people with psychosis experience visions. However, little is known about what people see, and current treatments have limited benefits.
Objectives
To improve the understanding and treatment of visions, this study explored the phenomenology of visions in people with psychosis.
Methods
Twelve people with psychosis participat...
Background
Suicide is one of the major causes of premature death in patients diagnosed with a schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic disorder. However, associations between psychotic-like experiences in youth and suicidality in later life remain under-researched.
Aims
We aimed to investigate any associations between early experiences of thought interfer...
In much contemporary psychiatric training and practice, there is a strong emphasis on the audible or perceptual quality and externality of auditory verbal hallucinations in clinical assessments. A typical question during clinical assessment is asking whether the voices that a person hears sound identical to the way the clinician's voice is heard. I...
Delusions of Thought Insertion (TI) are considered as one of the most complex psychotic experiences. More prevalent in schizophrenia, TI involves subjects reporting that entities of different nature have introduced thoughts or ideas into their minds. The particularity of this phenomenon is not that patients have been just caused to have certain unu...
218 words] In this paper, we focus on a particular kind of emotional impact of the pandemic, namely the phenomenology of the experience of moral injury in healthcare professionals. Drawing on Weber's reflections in his lecture Politics as a Vocation and data from the Experiences of Social Distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic Survey, we analyse r...
Psychosis research has traditionally focused on vulnerability and the detrimental outcomes of risk exposure. However, there is substantial variability in psychological and functional outcomes for those at risk for psychosis, even among individuals at high risk. Comparatively little work has highlighted the factors associated with resilience and the...
Background
Psychotic disorders and eating disorders are complex mental illnesses associated with increased mortality and functional impairment. This study aimed to investigate the co-occurrence and relationships between eating disorders and psychotic disorders and assess the mediation effect of mood instability.
Methods
This study used data from t...
In trying to make sense of the extensive phenomenological variation of first-personal reports on auditory verbal hallucinations, the concept of pseudohallucination is originally introduced to designate any hallucinatory-like phenomena not exhibiting some of the paradigmatic features of “genuine” hallucinations. After its introduction, Karl Jaspers...
Delusions are transdiagnostic and heterogeneous phenomena with varying degrees of intensity, stability, and dimensional attributes where the boundaries between everyday beliefs and delusional beliefs can be experienced as clearly demarcated, fuzzy, or indistinguishable. This highlights the difficulty in defining delusional realities. All individual...
Background: Patterns of development and underlying factors explaining anxiety
disorders in children and adolescents are under‐researched, despite their high
prevalence, impact and associations with other mental disorders. We aimed to a]
understand the pattern and persistence of specific anxiety disorders; b] examine
differing trajectories of sympto...
I reflect on what may be termed ‘omnipotent passivity and omniscient oblivion’ which are some of the key paradoxes within schizophrenia. I discuss various aspects of insight and self-awareness as components of clinical recovery and argue that the minds affected by schizophrenia can in fact be very insightful, albeit a different kind of insight enti...
Background
Delusions are a common transdiagnostic feature of psychotic disorders, and their treatment remains suboptimal. Despite the pressing need to better understand the nature, meaning, and course of these symptoms, research into the lived experience of delusional phenomena in psychosis is scarce. Thus, we aimed to explore the lived experience...
Most people would never question what makes a thought theirs. Nothing seems to signal ‘madness’ such as schizophrenia more than the claims that one’s thoughts and actions are not one’s own. In a sense, individuals with schizophrenia suffer from a kind of disbelief, namely the disbelief toward the Cartesian certainty. Anything that challenges this c...
Self-disorders have been proposed as the “clinical core” of the schizophrenia spectrum. This has been explored in recent studies using self-disorder assessment tools. However, there are few systematic discussions of their quality and utility. Therefore, a literature search was performed on Medline, Embase, PsychINFO, PubMed and the Web of Science....
Background
Recent research has investigated the use of serious games as a form of therapeutic intervention for depression and anxiety in young people.
Aims
To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis into the effectiveness of gaming interventions for treating either depression or anxiety in individuals aged 12–25 years.
Method
An electronic...
Abstract
Background
Recent research has investigated the use of serious games as a form of therapeutic intervention for depression and anxiety in young people.
Aims
To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis into the effectiveness of gaming interventions for treating either depression or anxiety in individuals aged 12–25 years.
Method
An e...
Introduction
Hallucinations research is increasingly incorporating philosophy or the work of philosophically trained individuals. We present three different ways in which this is successfully implemented to the enhancement of knowledge and understanding of hallucinations and related phenomena.
Method
We review contributions from phenomenology, phi...
Abstract
Background
Triple chronotherapy (sleep deprivation for 36 h, followed by 4 days of advancing the time of sleep and daily morning bright-light therapy for 6 months) has demonstrated benefits for the rapid treatment of depressive symptoms in four small controlled trials of in-patients.
Aims
To test the feasibility of recruitment and deliver...
Background: Cannabis use is a global public health issue associated with increased risks of developing mental health disorders, especially in young people. We aimed to investigate the relationships between cannabis exposure and risks of receiving mental illness diagnoses or treatment as outcomes.
Methods: A population based, retrospective, open coh...
The bodily self is key to emotional embodiment, which is important for social functioning and emotion regulation. There is a paucity of research systematically assessing how basic and bodily self-disturbances relate to multimodal hallucinations. This study hypothesised that participants with greater hallucination-proneness would report greater degr...
Background
Schizophrenia is associated with premature mortality, partly through increased suicide rates.
Aims
To examine (1) if persecutory ideas, auditory hallucinations, and probable cases of psychosis are associated with suicidal thoughts or attempts cross-sectionally and prospectively, and (2) if such links are mediated by specific affective f...
Aims
Psychosis research has largely focused on symptoms which are easier to define. Symptoms which are challenging to detect and articulate, including disturbances in the basic- and bodily-self, may not be volunteered by patients, despite causing significant distress. Increased understanding of such symptoms, which may present in the prodromal phas...
Aims
Triple chronotherapy (defined as sleep deprivation for 36 hours, followed by 4 days of advancing the time of sleep, together with daily morning bright light therapy for 6 months) has demonstrated benefits for the rapid treatment of depressive symptoms in 4 small, controlled trials of in-patients. Our aims were to test the feasibility of recrui...
This study examines the interconnectedness between absorption, inner speech, self, and psychopathology. Absorption involves an intense focus and immersion in mental imagery, sensory/perceptual stimuli, or vivid imagination that involves decreased self-awareness and alterations in consciousness. In psychosis, the dissolution and permeability in the...
Significant developments in schizophrenia psychopathology are ready to be incorporated into clinical practice. These advances allow a way forward through the well-described challenges experienced with current diagnostic and psychopathological frameworks. This article discusses approaches that will enable clinicians to access a wider and richer spec...
There is a gap in the literature investigating the impact of obstetric complications on subsequent mental ill health outcomes. The aim of this study was to establish the association between post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) and mental ill health. We conducted a retrospective open cohort study utilizing linked primary care (The Health Improvement Networ...
Can delusions, in the context of psychosis, enhance a person’s sense of
meaningfulness? The case described here suggests that, in some circumstances, they
can. This prompts further questions into the complexities of delusion as
a lived phenomenon, with important implications for the clinical encounter. While
assumptions of meaninglessness are often...
Background: To date, the lifetime prevalence of Bipolar Disorder (BD) and BD patients’ access to mental health care in England has not been systematically studied.
Methods: We used data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014 (N=7546). The Mood Disorders Questionnaire (MDQ) was used to screen for BD. Associations between sociodemographic...
Background
Depersonalization and derealization are currently considered diagnostically distinct from first-rank symptoms (FRS) seen in schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses. Nevertheless, the lived experiences of these symptoms can be very similar phenomenologically.
Aims
To investigate the interrelationships between depersonalization, derealization an...
Background
There is evidence that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is effective for treating adult depression. However, it remains unclear whether rTMS is an effective treatment for adolescent depression. This systematic review examines the existing literature on the effectiveness and acceptability of rTMS in the treatment of ado...
Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) are often associated with high levels of distress and disability in individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. In around 30% of individuals with distressing AVH and diagnosed with schizophrenia, traditional antipsychotic drugs have little or no effect. Thus, it is important to develop mechanistic models...
In this Personal View, we discuss the history and concept of self-disturbance in relation to the pathophysiology and subjective experience of schizophrenia in terms of three approaches: the perceptual anomalies approach of the early Heidelberg School of Psychiatry, the ipseity model, and the predictive coding framework. Despite the importance of th...
Background:
Chronotherapy (sleep deprivation, sleep phase shifting and/or the use of bright light) combines non-invasive and non-pharmacological interventions that may act rapidly against depressive symptoms. However, to date no meta-analysis has been conducted to examine their effectiveness.
Methods:
We carried out meta-analysis of 16 studies (...
Schizophrenia-spectrum psychoses are highly complex and heterogeneous disorders that necessitate multiple lines of scientific inquiry and levels of explanation. In recent years, both computational and phenomenological approaches to the understanding of mental illness have received much interest , and significant progress has been made in both field...
Recent psychiatric research and treatment initiatives have tended to move away from traditional diagnostic categories and have focused instead on transdiagnostic phenomena, such as hallucinations. However, this emphasis on isolated experiences may artificially limit the definition of such phenomena and ignore the rich, complex, and dynamic changes...
The role of inner speech in the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) and delusions remains unclear. This exploratory study tested for differences in inner speech (assessed via self-report questionnaire) between 89 participants with psychosis and 37 non-clinical controls. We also tested for associations of inner speech with, i) state/t...
Schizophrenia is a serious and debilitating mental illness, and sufferers frequently experience a multitude of symptoms. Of particular interest to the current Thesis are psychotic symptoms including delusions, hallucinations and associated self-disturbances such as interference in the agency and ownership of thoughts and actions. Since the disorder...
Schizophrenia as a pathology of self-awareness has attracted much attention from philosophical theorists and empirical scientists alike. I view schizophrenia as a basic self-disturbance leading to a lifeworld of solipsism adopted by the sufferer and explain how this adoption takes place, which then manifests in ways such as first-rank psychotic sym...
Introduction: The predictive processing framework has attracted much interest in the field of schizophrenia research in recent years, with an increasing number of studies also carried out in healthy individuals with nonclinical psychosis-like experiences. The current research adopted a continuum approach to psychosis and aimed to investigate differ...
The sense of perplexity is a key feature of delusional mood/ atmosphere which plays an important role in the phenomenology of early psychosis. Here we begin this Chapter by presenting a clinical scenario of the psychosis prodrome and refer to this case study as our basis of discussion. We provide a detailed picture of psychiatric and philosophical...
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are complex experiences
that occur in the context of various clinical disorders.
AVH also occur in individuals from the general population
who have no identifiable psychiatric or neurological diagnoses.
This article reviews research on AVH in nonclinical individuals
and provides a cross-disciplinary view of the...
Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), the phenomenology of voice-hearing remains opaque and under-theorised. In this paper, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and...
Previous studies have shown that drugs which block the reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters improve impulse control in diseases such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) lack efficacy in ADHD and have been linked to increased suicide risk. The present study investigated drugs with...
