Medicine, health care, and philosophy
June 1, 2022
Riccardo Miceli Mcmillan, Christopher Jordens
15 citations
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) may treat major depressive disorder by inducing broadened pre-intentional possibility, which produces sudden, profound, and enduring changes in how patients experience their bodies, self-narratives, and social connections. Drawing on phenomenological accounts, the paper argues that depression involves three forms of alienation or unhomelike being-in-the-world: illness suffering (embodiment), existential suffering (self-narratives), and political suffering (social relationships). PAP counteracts the loss of pre-intentional possibility that characterizes depression, consistent with a bio-psycho-social model of mental health. This framework supports the plausibility of reported treatment success and justifies further empirical research.
Medicine, health care, and philosophy
May 2, 2026
Hugh Brosnahan, Izabela Lipińska
1 citation
Sustained interaction with conversational AI can, in a small subset of users, contribute to the emergence or stabilization of delusional experience. Existing explanations attribute this to individual vulnerability or safety failures, but this paper argues the risk arises from the relational and ontological structure of the interaction itself. Conversational AI generates ontological dissonance: a conflict between the appearance of relational presence and the absence of any subject capable of sustaining it. Maintained through a communicative double bind and amplified by attentional asymmetries, this dissonance tends, under conditions of affective vulnerability, to stabilize into a technologically mediated analogue of folie à deux. This account explains why explicit disclaimers often fail to disrupt delusional involvement and clarifies ethical and clinical implications.
Medicine, health care, and philosophy
May 30, 2026
Luis De Miranda
The article redefines bioethics as 'bios ethikos'—ethical reflection on what makes forms of life meaningful and inhabitable—by analyzing the ancient distinction between zoē (biological life as organic functioning) and bios (a human life shaped by meaning and values). It introduces the 'existential remainder' to capture ethically significant aspects of lived existence that institutional deliberation often overlooks. A heuristic formula, T = PEWS + C, is proposed: ethical thinking (T) distributes across four domains—Person, Earth, Work, and Society (PEWS)—plus a creative openness (C) that resists full codification. Bioethics thus becomes not merely regulation of life but reflection on whether governance sustains conditions for a meaningfully lived life.
Medicine, health care, and philosophy
May 3, 2025
Jake Dorothy
Survivors of complex trauma often experience memory blanks that are disturbingly felt even though they cannot recall the missing events. Drawing on survivor testimonies and phenomenological methods, the author argues that these gaps are accompanied by a non-conceptual body memory that lacks propositional content and remains uncontextualized. This dissociative body memory has two features: habitual dissociation and protentive salience. The perceived gap is actually a partial gap involving pre-reflective remembering not recognized as such. Dissociative body memory prevents narrative integration, sustaining a sense of foreboding about the past. Clinically, what survivors experience as forgotten must not be disregarded; theoretically, this may be a characteristic of complex PTSD.