Empathy Takes Action: An Autistic Therapist on the Radical Work of Connection

In Human Rights in Psychiatry: Prospects and Dilemmas of Abolishing Coercion in Mental Health Care (Springer, 2025), Professor Dirk Richter describes the ethical lines of conflict, shows why coercion can no longer be justified and analyzes the consequences and dilemmas of a possible abolition of coercive measures in psychiatric care. The use of coercion in mental health care is one of the most controversial topics in psychiatric nursing and psychiatry. The conflict line centers around the UN-Convention in the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD). Advocates of the CRPD are pushing for the complete abolition of coercion while opponents see central medical and legal aspects of care for people with mental health problems at risk. Clinicians in conventional psychiatry, including many mental health nurses, primarily justify these measures because of the assumed benefits of coercion-associated care and with the argument that many people affected are unable to make appropriate decisions for their own health in a crisis situation. This argument also applies to human rights, for example by basing coercive measures in the event of suicidality on the right to life. Three central topics are developed in the book. First, it is shown that psychiatric coercion can no longer be justified because the current practice of psychiatric care does not meet the ethico-legal requirements for the use of coercion. Second, a human rights-based approach of psychiatric care is outlined, which is fundamentally based on the will and preferences of people with mental health problems. Third, the consequences and dilemmas are indicated, e.g., the issue of how to deal with suicidality or dementia without the use of coercion. This book is aimed to receive a specific attention from the psychiatric nursing community. It is also relevant to lawyers, human rights practitioners, and mental health professionals more broadly.

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.

Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life – for example, when we are silenced – as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania. In Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2027), Dan Degerman argues for the need to consider silence in mental disorders in a nuanced way that recognizes different forms of silence and different, including positive, ways silences of speech and inner speech can be experienced. The poverty of speech in depression may lead to the fetishizing of silence-breaking that can cause more distress to a patient who simply does not have anything they want to say, while the pressure of speech in mania may involve disruption in a multicomponent capacity to reliably initiate and maintain silence that is usually habitual and occasionally deliberate. Degerman, who is a research fellow at the University of Bristol on the Epistemic Injustice in Health Care Project, provides an analysis of different types of silence, discusses first-person experiences of being silent in depression and mania, and points to ways in which philosophers and clinicians can enrich their understandings and practices involving silences.

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from Rachel Aviv, the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.