Vaughan Bell

Does anyone use the Spanish version of the RBANS ("Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status")? If you are able to send us an original form, we would be happy to compensate you for it.

¿Alguien utiliza la versión en español del RBANS (“Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status”)? Si puede enviarnos un formulario original, con gusto le ofreceremos una compensación por ello.

Not a British Neuropsychiatry Association member but want to keep informed about our events?

You can sign up to the announcements mailing list at the bottom of this page: bnpa.org.uk

🚨The programme for our March conference is now online
bnpa.org.uk/agm/

Sessions on
🔹neuropsychiatry of epilepsy
🔹rethinking TBI
🔹functional cognitive disorder
🔹identity and memory
🔹fixation and forensic risk
🔹ultrasound as neurostim
🔹insight disorders

and more!

Lots of headlines linking menopause to dementia this morning based on a study that doesn't link menopause to dementia www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

Epic piece from @anilseth.bsky.social on The Mythology Of Conscious AI www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

Methodological flaw may upend network mapping tool The lesion network mapping method, used to identify disease-specific brain networks for clinical stimulation, produces a nearly identical network map for any given condition, according to a new study.

Lesion network mapping method, used to identify disease-specific brain networks, produces a nearly identical network map for any given condition, according to a new study www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin... via @drrickadams.bsky.social

The NIMH have seemingly set most of their RDoC videos to private www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyGt...

I've used an excerpt of that talk for teaching for about 10 years and it's suddenly gone.

There's only a single video on their channel with mentions RDoC now www.youtube.com/@NIMHgov/sea...

What a magnificent book. Just recently finished @matthewcobb.bsky.social's The Idea of the Brain which is a wonderful history of neuroscience.

I'll be straight, it's not gripping, it goes into too much detail but it is deeply enjoyable and absolutely epic in scope.

Reliably one of the most fascinating conferences of the year. Registration now open. See you there!

British Neuropsychiatry Association founded in 1987. Academic & professional body for practitioners & professionals allied to medicine at the interface of the clinical & cognitive neurosciences, & psychiatry

2026 British Neuropsychiatry Association Conference. Registration is open.

Memory & identity, brain injury, epilepsy, functional cognitive disorder, evolving forensic risk, neurostimulation

📍 London | 🗓 12–13 March 2026
🤝 Joint meeting with DoN

Programme and registration👉 bnpa.org.uk/agm/

...as well as the 'mainstream' of neuropsychiatry.

All of the authors made massive contributions but I owe a special debt to @jrbneuropsiq.bsky.social, @santamaria-garcia.bsky.social and Jorge Holguín who have really shaped my neuropsychiatry thinking over the years. Mil gracias.

It's also just fascinating.

Lots of Latin American neuropsychiatrists have additional expertise in managing things like snakebite-induced stroke, mercury poisoning from gold mining, impact of armed conflict, neuropsychiatric effects of 'tropical disease', mountain sickness, rare dementias...

I don't think first author @jrbneuropsiq.bsky.social is very active here but new from us in Lancet Americas:

Towards a Latin American neuropsychiatry
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Co-written between colleagues on what makes Latin American neuropsychiatry important, regionally and globally.

For a more nuanced view of C19th psychiatry in general, I have been spending years compiling this bibliography - it wasn't all restraints and stigma - www.lesleyahall.net/victpsyc.htm

Great round up

Why Couples Therapists Are Sick of ‘Therapy-Speak’ What happens when spouses accuse each other of gaslighting? Nothing good.

Misused therapy concepts absorbed into popular culture are making run-of-the-mill relationship problems harder to resolve www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/...

Interesting @olgakhazan.bsky.social piece in The Atlantic

Archived version: archive.is/P7Tf6

To be fair, he does do this. Grabbing from my bookshelf, it's in the preface of Man Who Mistook and Awakenings. "...names and some circumstantial details have been changed for reasons of personal and professional confidence, but my aim has been to preserve the essential 'feeling' of their lives".

Sacks was a pioneer in crossing the medical / popular 'case study' writing traditions, so there was little precedent. In some ways, I think he chose the worse of both worlds. Accurate enough to identify patients, embellished enough to not satisfy academic tradition.

So, I think the issue is a little more complex. What Sacks should have done in terms of accuracy is not entirely clear to me. Most modern 'case study' writers have actually gone the other way and aimed for greater embellishment, especially for clinical details, for the sake of anonymity.

Clinicians writing popular accounts of 'cases' don't have the same journalist responsibility to be accurate. They have a medical ethical responsibility to obscure clinical details that could identify (unless with consent). The question of what counts as 'truth' here has not been well explored.

Including yourself aside, this would make any clinician who's written a 'book about case studies' that are necessarily fictionalised composites, a fraud. My concern is mostly the reverse, that in early work he wrote about patients in enough detail to identify them, without well established consent.

So, this isn't a clear case of journalistic fraud, and notably, Aviv doesn't identify it as such. It does raise important questions about the use of fictionalisation in clinical writing though - questions that have been very poorly considered until now. Aviv raises them very effectively.

What's notable about Aviv's Sacks article is not so much that he fictionalised (although you can argue about the extent to which this was appropriate for any particular case), but that he fictionalised using his own story to fill other people's stories.

Should Therapists Write About Patients? Even when we disguise their identities, we risk betraying them.

Gary Greenberg has written about the challenges of this in The NYT, noting it involves legal review, ethics, and personal considerations: “The question isn’t whether someone else will recognize your patients, it’s whether or not they would recognize themselves” archive.nytimes.com/opinionator....

Some nuance needed here I think. Clinicians writing about clinical cases have a responsibility to ensure individuals are sufficiently fictionalised to avoid identifying them (unless the writer has informed consent to include personal details). Many such 'clinical cases' books are written this way...

Poster showing the schedule for Theory of Mind in AI workshop at AAAI 2026, featuring 3 keynote speakers, a hackathon, posters, and flash talks. Sponsored by Edith Cowan University and Ketryx

Full details for the 2026 ToM4AI Workshop @aaai.org are now live (ToM4AI.com)

100+ registrations, 40 papers, 3 keynotes, & a hackathon, spanning cog sci, philosophy, psychiatry, computer science, and robotics

@nitalon.bsky.social @stefansarkadi.bsky.social @reuth-mirsky.bsky.social

Curious why we sometimes see minds where there are none? 🧠 Join us to uncover the foundations of attributed agency.

Fully funded PhD for next year as part of DRIVE-Health, working with me, Adam Hampshire & @stefansarkadi.bsky.social

Deadline: 12/1/26
Reach out for an informal chat!

New from us, led by the fantastic Keishema Kerr:

A scoping review unpacking how neuropsychiatry and behavioural neurology training looks like world-wide

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

with Lauren Burns, Sheldon Benjamin, Eileen Joyce, Jasvinder Singh, @jrbneuropsiq.bsky.social and Biba Stanton

The Hitchhiker’s guide to hallucination research Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This artic…

The Hitchhiker’s guide to hallucination research www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Wonderfully titled and useful paper from Inés Abalo-Rodríguez and Ana Pinheiro