Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric condition characterized by instability in identity, relationships, and affect. Individuals, with BPD typically lack a coherent sense of self, are highly sensitive to interpersonal stressors, experience intense fluctuations in mood, and frequently engage in impulsive and self-destructive behaviors. Although both empirical research and development of effective psychotherapy have evidently progressed over the past years, many aspects regarding the structure of experience and the life-world typical for persons with BPD are not yet fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Delusions in schizophrenia are commonly approached as empirical false beliefs about everyday reality. Phenomenological accounts, by contrast, have suggested that delusions are more adequately understood as pertaining to a different kind of reality experience. How this alteration of reality experience should be characterised, which dimensions of experiential life are involved, and whether delusional reality might differ from standard reality in various ways is unclear and little is known about how patients with delusions value and relate to these experiential alterations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTijdschr Psychiatr
June 2021
Researchers that try to identify the relationship between hope and mental health often lack a conceptual understanding of 'hope'. Nonetheless, experiences of despair that are central in depression seem to surpass our everyday understanding of hope and hopelessness. How can this despair be understood and recognized? OBJECTIVE To describe depression through a phenomenological understanding of hope and to explore how this insight relates to our current definition of depression as a mood disorder, as well as to clinical practice.
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