This article by Grace Huckins is subtitled “A small group of schizophrenia researchers thinks that personal narratives can tell us what test scores and brain scans can’t”. It has been published by Wired. It begins:
“FOR THE FIRST decades of Sohee Park’s career in schizophrenia research, she rarely stopped to consider what life was like for her research subjects. Now a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, Park made a name for herself by studying working memory—the quick, scratch-pad-like memory that helps us keep track of what we’re doing. By using simple tasks to deconstruct the workings of the schizophrenic brain, Park hoped to puzzle out the underlying causes of the condition’s reality-bending symptoms—like delusions, false beliefs that are resistant to contradictory evidence, and hallucinations, which often take the form of imagined voices.
‘We do symptom interviews all the time, where we ask set questions about symptoms—and these are very standardized, and that’s what we’re supposed to do,” she says. “We never really just chat about life, or their philosophy on life, or how they feel about their condition in general.’ …”
You can read more from here.
