Resistances Encountered in Starting a Group Therapy Program for Suicide Attempters in Varied Administrative Settings

ABSTRACT: This paper reports a number of areas of difficulty—funding issues, managment and personal bias issues, theoretical issues—which emerged in the development of five treatment groups comprised entirely of depressed and suicidal patients. These groups reflected a coordinated effort between the city-county mental health system and the specific funding agencies. Strategies for overcoming these difficulties are discussed.     

Concepts dissolve artificial boundaries in the study of emotion and cognition,uniting body,brain, and mind

ABSTRACT

Theories of emotion have often maintained artificial boundaries: for instance, that cognition and emotion are separable, and that an emotion concept is separable from the emotional events that comprise its category (e.g. “fear” is distinct from instances of fear). Over the past several years, research has dissolved these artificial boundaries, suggesting instead that conceptual construction is a domain-general process—a process by which the brain makes meaning of the world. The brain constructs emotion concepts, but also cognitions and perceptions, all in the service of guiding action. In this view, concepts are multimodal constructions, dynamically prepared from a set of highly variable instances. This approach obviates old questions (e.g. how does cognition regulate emotion?) but generates new ones (e.g. how does a brain learn emotion concepts?). In this paper, we review this constructionist, predictive coding account of emotion, considering its implications for health and well-being, culture and development.