Papers by Massimiliano Aragona
Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Psychiatry
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2023;16(1):14-27., 2023
We present the first version of the Phenomenological Auditory Hallucination Scale (PAHS.1). It is... more We present the first version of the Phenomenological Auditory Hallucination Scale (PAHS.1). It is an instrument designed for clinical practice and psychopathological research. Our main aim is to explore hallucinations with a specific attention to the qualitative subtle features that often are crucial for the assessment. A first step was to enrich the definitions of commonly used scales with core details of the hallucinatory phenomenon. Moreover, we considered hallucinations not as an object but as the emergence of a figure-background articulation during an interpersonal dialogue. This has at least two consequences. First, that the scale is designed to assess not only the intrinsic features of hallucinations but also the context in which they are situated. Including the landscape means to evaluate other features (above all, the state of consciousness while hearing voices) that are assessed with the methods of classical descriptive psychopathology, but also other phenomena (e.g., the surrounding atmosphere, the experience of time, etc.) that are typically studied in phenomenological psychopathology. Second, that while some phenomena are experienced in first-person by the patient, others are perceived/conceived by the clinician (often by means of empathic abilities, atmospheric perception, etc.) and need to be rated by the interviewer. Accordingly, the PAHS.1 is structured as a clinician-administered scale in which the psychopathologists can report what the patient communicate about his/her disturbances and what the clinician observe about the patient and him/herself. To avoid Procrustean effects and petrification of the phenomena, we publish here a first draft of the scale that will change following the inputs arriving from our readers. Only after a circular work of conceptual critiques and adjustments (collective revision) we will consider formal validation procedures. Finally, in our view the PAHS should be useful for both clinical exploration of the phenomena (the phenomenological 'unfolding' of experiences) and prototypical research.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Official Journal of the Italian Society of Psychopathology, Aug 14, 2006
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
European Psychiatry, 2012
ABSTRACT Empathy became a fashionable phenomenon to study with the functional imaging techniques ... more ABSTRACT Empathy became a fashionable phenomenon to study with the functional imaging techniques of modern neurosciences. To many, neurosciences (in particular the theory of mirror neurons) are providing the scientific proof that empathy is a “real” phenomenon. The studies addressing the empathy for human pain will be used here to discuss the relation between the concept of empathy as it was conceived in philosophy and psychology at one side, and the experimental results at the other side. It will be shown that the conception of empathy has changed across centuries, moving from a philosophical standpoint to a psychological one, and eventually to current neurophysiology. Even in modern neuroscience the definition of empathy widely varies in the various studies; it oscillates between an automatic and preconscious phenomenon to one influenced by drives, beliefs and expectations. In conclusion, this review shows that modern neurosciences do not provide a simple neurological basis for the classic concept of empathy (seen as a unitary and stable phenomenon). On the contrary, they contribute to reshape the original concept, which now tends to be subdivided in different features related to different patterns of brain activity, with both top-down and bottom-up arms.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nóos, 1998
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sistemi intelligenti, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Migration and Torture in Today’s World, Jan 9, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
World Psychiatry
Psychosis is the most ineffable experience of mental disorder. We provide here the first co‐writt... more Psychosis is the most ineffable experience of mental disorder. We provide here the first co‐written bottom‐up review of the lived experience of psychosis, whereby experts by experience primarily selected the subjective themes, that were subsequently enriched by phenomenologically‐informed perspectives. First‐person accounts within and outside the medical field were screened and discussed in collaborative workshops involving numerous individuals with lived experience of psychosis as well as family members and carers, representing a global network of organizations. The material was complemented by semantic analyses and shared across all collaborators in a cloud‐based system. The early phases of psychosis (i.e., premorbid and prodromal stages) were found to be characterized by core existential themes including loss of common sense, perplexity and lack of immersion in the world with compromised vital contact with reality, heightened salience and a feeling that something important is abo...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Clinician in the Psychiatric Diagnostic Process, 2022
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
European Psychiatry, 2016
This symposium analyses the psychopathological phenomenon “anxiety”, a classical concept, which h... more This symposium analyses the psychopathological phenomenon “anxiety”, a classical concept, which has returned to be central in the recent psychiatric debate. Some of the most important international phenomenologists will discuss anxiety in the context of major psychopathological areas. Clinical and research insight will be presented in the context of a philosophically deep understanding of the fundamental qualitative features of the psychopathology of anxiety.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Official Journal of the Italian Society of Psychopathology, Mar 6, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Mar 29, 2023
Objectives. Mental health services utilization decreased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemi... more Objectives. Mental health services utilization decreased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. For persons who are highly vulnerable and at risk of health and social care exclusion, restrictions negatively affected the accessibility to treatments and their mental conditions. Methods. All psychiatric and psychological interviews carried out at National Institute for Health, Migration and Poverty (INMP) Italy from January 2018 to February 2022 were included in the study. To measure services use, an interrupted time-series analysis using March 2020 as the starting data of COVID-19 pandemic period was considered, and first visits vs follow-up session numbered. Results. A significant decrease was observed in March 2020 due to the lockdown restrictive measures (p<0.001). Later on, the number of psychological interventions significantly increased (p<0.05), whereas the increment of the psychiatric interventions was not significant. By the end of February 2022 the number of visits returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, although recovery was slower than expected, especially for psychiatric visits. Conclusions. After a dramatic drop during the lockdown, access to mental health outpatient clinics slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels in the next two years. Considering that mental health needs have increased during the pandemic, mental health services should improve their efforts to reduce barriers of access and to implement outreach referral.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Annali dell'Istituto Superiore di Sanità, 2023
Objectives. Mental health services utilization decreased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemi... more Objectives. Mental health services utilization decreased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. For persons who are highly vulnerable and at risk of health and social care exclusion, restrictions negatively affected the accessibility to treatments and their mental conditions. Methods. All psychiatric and psychological interviews carried out at National Institute for Health, Migration and Poverty (INMP) Italy from January 2018 to February 2022 were included in the study. To measure services use, an interrupted time-series analysis using March 2020 as the starting data of COVID-19 pandemic period was considered, and first visits vs follow-up session numbered. Results. A significant decrease was observed in March 2020 due to the lockdown restrictive measures (p<0.001). Later on, the number of psychological interventions significantly increased (p<0.05), whereas the increment of the psychiatric interventions was not significant. By the end of February 2022 the number of visits returned to pre-COVID-19 levels, although recovery was slower than expected, especially for psychiatric visits. Conclusions. After a dramatic drop during the lockdown, access to mental health outpatient clinics slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels in the next two years. Considering that mental health needs have increased during the pandemic, mental health services should improve their efforts to reduce barriers of access and to implement outreach referral.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences, 2016
The last sentence of my article on the neurobiological context of qualia is: “Future neurobiologi... more The last sentence of my article on the neurobiological context of qualia is: “Future neurobiological approaches might identify the neuronal processes involved in qualia and how they are involved, but it seems illusory to us [.. to me] to explain the individual quale”. Accordingly I do agree with Maung that the paper does not solve the “hard problem of Chalmers”. Instead, my article approaches it as a neurobiological problem, not as a philosophical issue.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This case study deals with failure to ejaculate intravaginally during sexual intercourse. The cau... more This case study deals with failure to ejaculate intravaginally during sexual intercourse. The causative factors were thought to be unconscious in nature. The patient showed signifi cant improvement after only one session, when these unconscious factors were interpreted to and accepted by the patient. We discuss briefl y the application of psychodynamic theory in sex therapy and possible implementations in training settings.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Massimiliano Aragona
This contribution will focus on the first available example of deliberate transposition of a hermeneutic procedure (the method of the ‘understanding’), already available in the human sciences of the time, into the realm of clinical psychopathology. In the first section I consider the concept of understanding (Verstehen) in the hermeneutic tradition and in the epistemological debate about human sciences in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. The second section explores the characteristics of the Verstehen as it was used in the General Psychopathology written by Karl Jaspers (1913). Finally, the third section deals with the problem of the coexistence, in the same concept of Verstehen, of intuition and interpretation, showing that Jaspers inaugurated a new hermeneutic approach but did not complete this task, leaving it in sketchy form.
Rispetto al concetto di comprendere, viene sottolineato che il contributo di Jaspers resta fondamentale per chi oggi voglia occuparsi di empatia in psicologia.
Nell’atto di comprendere noi operiamo una sintesi globale di immedesimazione intuitiva, implicita ed affettiva, e di interpretazione. In altre parole, nel comprendere jaspersiano intuizione e interpretazione coesistono nella pratica, per cui il tema dell’interpretazione rientra de facto e a pieno titolo nel seno della questione dell’immedesimazione empatica. Piano affettivo e piano cognitivo sono sempre compresenti nell’atto empatico, e la sfida che ci lancia Jaspers è di riuscire a rimanere, nella nostra interpretazione, più vicini possibile ai fenomeni effettivamente vissuti, seppur consapevoli che una epoché radicale è impossibile.