Search Results (19)

Narrative therapy generally avoids medical language and diagnostic labels, instead emphasizing collaborative dialogue centered on values and strengths. How does this approach apply to children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most common neurodevelopmental condition? This study presents the first scoping review on this topic. A systematic search of five databases (APA PsycNET, PubMed, Web of Science, ProQuest, and Google Scholar) identified 24 records meeting the inclusion criteria. Four key insights emerged relating to the therapies: (1) philosophical foundations; (2) unique perspective on ADHD; (3) practical interventions (e.g., externalizing and separating the problem from the child, identifying ‘sparkling moments’); (4) reported effectiveness. Further research is recommended to evaluate the therapy’s empirical impact and explore its potential to empower children by co-creating a ‘health-side story’ that shifts focus from problems to strengths, relationships, and values. Full article

The enactive approach offers a powerful theoretical lens for designing artificial intelligence (AI) systems intended to support the health and well-being of non-neurotypical individuals, including those on the autism spectrum and those with with ADHD, dyslexia, or other forms of neurodivergence. By emphasizing embodiment, relationality, and participatory sense-making, enactivism encourages AI-based interventions that are highly personalized, context-sensitive, and ethically aware. This paper explores how existing AI applications—ranging from socially assistive robots and virtual reality (VR) therapies to language-processing apps and personalized treatment planning—may be enhanced by incorporating enactivist principles. Despite their promise, practical adoption of AI technologies in real-world clinical practice remains limited, and persistent challenges such as algorithmic bias, privacy concerns, and the tendency to overlook subjective dimensions raise cautionary notes. Drawing on relevant philosophical literature, empirical studies, and cross-disciplinary debates (including the friction and potential synergies between predictive processing and enactivism), we argue that AI solutions grounded in enactivist thinking can more effectively honor user autonomy, acknowledge the embodied nature of neurodiverse cognition, and avoid reductive standardizations. This expanded, revised version integrates insights on neurodiversity, mental health paradigms, and the ethical imperatives of AI deployment, thereby offering a more comprehensive roadmap for researchers, clinicians, and system developers alike. Full article

This article discusses the nature of self-talk, characterizing it as a psycholinguistic activity consisting of the performance of speech acts directed to oneself. More specifically, it examines negative speech acts as embedded in behavioral and emotional reasoning, the performance of which creates behavioral and emotional disturbances for the agent, such as anxiety, depression, guilt, and anger. This characterization has important implications for psychotherapy, namely, that helping clients to identify these speech acts and replacing them with ones that have antidotal properties can be therapeutic. According to Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), a popular form of philosophical counseling, cardinal or key self-destructive speech acts can be counteracted by uplifting philosophical speech acts when the latter resonate with clients. This means that philosophical psychotherapies, such as LBT, can potentially have significant therapeutic value. Based on this premise, this article introduces and discusses an AI-generated “Toolbox” of philosophical antidotes created by the Institute for Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation in the United States to help clients find suitable, resonant philosophical antidotes to their self-destructive speech acts. Full article

One salient feature of Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), a form of philosophical counseling based on Rational–Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), is its inclusion of a set of guiding virtues that provide transcendent goals in overcoming self-destructive forms of thinking called “cardinal fallacies”. This paper discusses modes of interconnectivity between these virtues and some prominent types of cardinal fallacies and between each virtue and each fallacy. In comparison to other psychotherapeutic approaches, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Positive Psychology, it shows how clients who embrace these virtues can transcend matching fallacies that create states of negative emotions, such as anxiety and depression, and how these virtues can, in turn, interconnect human beings and promote positive growth. Full article

Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation (LBTC) identifies sets of irrational thinking or “cardinal fallacies” that promote self-defeating emotions, such as depression, anxiety, guilt, and anger. To overcome these fallacies, LBTC enlists philosophical ideas to attain virtue. The latter “guiding virtues” are ideals, never fully achievable, which are thus aspirational in character. Philosophical ideas are considered “uplifting” when they phenomenologically connect the client to such virtues. From this phenomenological perspective, this connection is experienced by the client as a “leading up” or transcendence with a sense of liberation from the suffering generated by the cardinal fallacy. Herein, lies an intensely spiritual experience. For clients who are religious and utilize religious philosophies to aspire to virtue, this experience is deeply religious. For those who embrace non-religious philosophies (those that are not God-centered), this liberating experience is nonetheless spiritual. It is typically described by clients as a sense of freedom or lightness; a deep peace of mind or serenity associated with the guiding virtue of all guiding virtues: metaphysical security. This article provides an analysis of the nature and conditions under which this deeply spiritual experience is attainable during the course of LBTC practice. Full article

The COVID-19 epidemic poses a worldwide threat that transcends provincial, philosophical, spiritual, radical, social, and educational borders. By using a connected network, a healthcare system with the Internet of Things (IoT) functionality can effectively monitor COVID-19 cases. IoT helps a COVID-19 patient recognize symptoms and receive better therapy more quickly. A critical component in measuring, evaluating, and diagnosing the risk of infection is artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used to anticipate cases and forecast the alternate incidences number, retrieved instances, and injuries. In the context of COVID-19, IoT technologies are employed in specific patient monitoring and diagnosing processes to reduce COVID-19 exposure to others. This work uses an Indian dataset to create an enhanced convolutional neural network with a gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model for COVID-19 death prediction via IoT. The data were also subjected to data normalization and data imputation. The 4692 cases and eight characteristics in the dataset were utilized in this research. The performance of the CNN-GRU model for COVID-19 death prediction was assessed using five evaluation metrics, including median absolute error (MedAE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), and coefficient of determination (R²). ANOVA and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were used to determine the statistical significance of the presented model. The experimental findings showed that the CNN-GRU model outperformed other models regarding COVID-19 death prediction. Full article

Sexuality and occupation are two constructs studied in different fields of knowledge. Particularly, in occupational therapy and occupational science, their relationship has been sparsely explored from a philosophical perspective. In the following reflection, we present some philosophical approaches to sexuality, occupation, and performativity to inquire about the impact of discourses about sexuality on the practice of occupations. For this analysis, we take an example developed by Foucault in one of his classes at the Collège de France. We believe that this helps us question the established discourses surrounding truth, especially concerning sexuality. Subsequently, we address the concept of occupation, taking into consideration Schliebener’s proposal from existentialist philosophy. Understanding occupation as a dimension of being, we explain how it can be comprehended through Butler’s theory of performativity and, consequently, express a sexual dimension. Finally, we establish an interconnection between the preceding concepts, taking sexual dissidents as an example. We propose that this reflection can broaden the possibilities of understanding occupations as points of resistance against normative discourses about sexuality. This may be relevant for contemplating practice and research in occupational science and occupational therapy, as it expands the understanding of sexuality beyond mere activities and centers it as a form of expression of being through occupation. Full article

Jacques Lacan’s ethical insights come up when he engages, inter alia, with Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. Tackling Aristotle’s ethics, Lacan complicates how human life would be best lived and fulfilled, and discussing Kant’s ethics, he sheds a different light on moral duty. In both cases, Lacan emphasizes the role of desire and law in the subject’s actions. Many Lacanian insights constitute a fertile context for political philosophy and philosophy of education to explore the ethic character of the subject. However, some postmodern political philosophers who draw on fundamental Lacanian concepts have theorized the “Self–Other” relationship in a way that ends up in a problematic ontological accommodation of evil. In this paper, I outline the aforementioned to highlight the following lacuna: much of the literature in educational philosophy that has utilized Lacan’s theory to deal with ethics has not addressed, head-on, whether the Lacanian subject is ethical, unethical, or none of these. Treating the subject as ethical or unethical would entail that Lacanian theory can mainly offer “diagnoses”. Treating the Lacanian subject as ethically neutral and, thus, as plastic, entails that Lacan’s theory leaves more ample space for “therapy”. My aim in this paper is to show that some unanswered questions regarding the (un)ethical subject in Lacan’s theory must be tackled if the philosophy of education that transfers Lacan’s ideas to the ethical educational context is to avoid self-contradiction. Full article

Introduction: Chronic pain is a growing worldwide health problem and complementary and integrative therapy options are becoming increasingly important. Multi-component yoga interventions represent such an integrative therapy approach with a promising body of evidence. Methods: The present study employed an experimental single-case multiple-baseline design. It investigated the effects of an 8-week yoga-based mind-body intervention, Meditation-Based Lifestyle Modification (MBLM), in the treatment of chronic pain. The main outcomes were pain intensity (BPI-sf), quality of life (WHO-5), and pain self-efficacy (PSEQ). Results: Twenty-two patients with chronic pain (back pain, fibromyalgia, or migraines) participated in the study and 17 women completed the intervention. MBLM proved to be an effective intervention for a large proportion of the participants. The largest effects were found for pain self-efficacy (TAU-U = 0.35), followed by average pain intensity (TAU-U = 0.21), quality of life (TAU-U = 0.23), and most severe pain (TAU-U = 0.14). However, the participants varied in their responses to the treatment. Conclusion: The present results point to relevant clinical effects of MBLM for the multifactorial conditions of chronic pain. Future controlled clinical studies should investigate its usefulness and safety with larger samples. The ethical and philosophical aspects of yoga should be further explored to verify their therapeutic utility. Full article

Desire is an important philosophical topic that deeply impacts everyday life. Philosophical practice is an emerging trend that uses philosophical theories and methods as a guide to living a eudaimonic life. In this paper, we define desire philosophically and compare different theories of desire in specific Eastern and Western traditions. Based on the Lacanian conceptual–terminological triad of “Need-Demand-Desire”, the research of desire is further divided into three dimensions, namely, the subject of desire, the object of desire, and the desire itself. The concept of desire is then analyzed from this triad and these three dimensions through different philosophical theories. This paper selects Buddhism as the representative of Eastern tradition, and Stoicism as the representative of the West, paying special attention to Stoicism’s “spiritual exercises” following Pierre Hadot. By exploring and comparing the Buddhist paths to liberation from suffering (i.e., the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path) and the two theoretical pillars in Stoicism (i.e., the notions of “living according to nature” and “the dichotomy of control”), practical guidance is then provided for understanding and regulating desire in times of crisis. This understanding and regulation of desire constitutes a philosophical therapy for today’s troubles, particularly those caused by excessive or irrational desires. Full article

Technology does change human lives, but my query is: does it change human selves too? On a closer look, it is observed that technology and the trail of human beings towards an authentic life (the highest desire) are central and pivotal to human living. However, most of us think of them as separate and unrelated. Technology is technical, the job of technicians, whereas queries of ‘authenticity’ are primarily philosophical, the job of the philosophers. But why do philosophers really bother about technology? This paper aims at a search for human authenticity even in the age of technology since humans are constantly in the process of becoming and they will continue to be so both socially and historically. The first segment of the paper focuses on how technology has depersonalized human persons, with respect to the views of many philosophers; in the second part, the concept of authenticity is understood in connection to our philosophical discourses. Finally, the unseparated relationship between technology and authenticity is explicated. My prime effort here is to understand authenticity from a value-based paradigm and as a therapy from the consumerist-driven materialistic life but not segregated from the prospects of a technocratic world. Full article

When the link between psychedelic drugs and mystical states of experience was first discovered in the 1960s, Huston Smith challenged scholars in religion and philosophy to consider the implications. Very few took up his challenge. Beginning in 2006, hundreds of studies have linked psychedelics not just to mystical states of experience but to potential treatments for many mental health disorders. Regulatory approval for therapies is on the horizon, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide could be treated. Research findings challenge the underlying rationale of the War on Drugs, leading to decriminalization of specific psychedelic drugs or to authorization of their use in mental health contexts. Religious institutions are slowly adapting, with some referring to psychedelics as sacraments or as pathways to deeper spirituality. Religious leaders are also beginning to speak out publicly in support of careful use of these drugs, and some are training to become “psychedelic chaplains” to work alongside mental health professionals administering these drugs. Scholars in theology and religion are encouraged to engage these trends, to explore challenging philosophical and theological issues surrounding mystical states of experience in general, and to consider the long-term cultural impact of the most recent psychedelic research. Full article

The concept of spirituality has a long philosophical history. Based on detailed studies of a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates, the Stoics, Epicureanism, to early Christianity, the former catholic priest Pierre Hadot conceives philosophical practice as spiritual exercises in learning how to live a philosophical life. Following this idea, a number of philosophers such as Gerd B. Achenbach started the contemporary movement of philosophical practice in the 1980s, which aimed to apply philosophical theories and methods to discussions about issues people constantly encounter in life, mainly in the forms of philosophical counseling and philosophical therapy. In this paper, after showing that philosophical practice has already become a new frontier in philosophical research, we further argue that philosophical practice as spiritual exercises is an exercise of reason and logos, while certain kinds of religious exercises such as Zen arts can also constitute an important part of philosophical practice. We conclude that in light of the distinct plurality of the methods and modes of philosophical practice and the spiritual exercises involved, philosophical practice can be considered a meaningful and applicable approach to pursuing truth, wisdom, and virtue, which is of great didactic and ethical significance in the post-COVID-19 era. Full article

Pharmaceutical care is a concept which has moved the pharmacy profession from their primary focus on the product to optimising drug therapy for the individual patient. Expanded pharmacy practice beyond pharmaceutical care will further challenge the role perceptions that other health professionals have about pharmacists. Role theory as a philosophical perspective was used to explore rural and remote health professionals’ beliefs on pharmacists expanding their clinical role by conducting twenty-three semi-structured interviews. Five role theory categories described the data, role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, role identity and role insufficiency. The health professionals interviewed were found to be uncertain about the boundaries between the traditional roles of the pharmacist compared to that of the expanded roles. A perceived lack of accountability by pharmacists was seen as a major contributor to role conflict, which in turn was found to impact the ability of pharmacists and other health professionals to work collaboratively. Perspectives of other health professionals on pharmacists adopting expanded practice models has highlighted significant concerns with role conflict and role identity. Acknowledging and developing clear strategies to address these concerns is essential to ensure that expanded pharmacy practice can be effectively integrated to improve access to health services and thus health outcomes for rural Australians. Full article

Background: An important field of human–animal interactions is animal-assisted interventions (AAIs), which refers to research on human–animal interactions in order to promote or facilitate health or education in humans. Very few studies among the rich literature on AAIs seem to include aspects of animal welfare and/or animal ethics. Also, very few studies on AAIs have a comprehensive human–animal approach that studies animals, humans, and the relations between them at the same time. This paper tries to argue for and present a possible comprehensive human–animal approach to evaluate AAIs. Methods: A combination of the species and role approach proposed by Lerner, the capability approach proposed by Nussbaum, and a modified comprehensive human–animal approach to evaluate AAIs proposed by Lerner and Silfverberg was philosophically analyzed. Results: This paper shows that the combination is the modified role and species version of the capabilities approach, and by following it one could do a comprehensive human–animal approach of an evaluation of AAIs. Conclusion: Although the aim was reached for horses and animal-assisted therapy, further work needs to be done for all species suggested in the IAHAIO (International Association of Human–Animal Interaction Organizations) White Paper as well as for all branches of AAIs in order to establish this comprehensive human–animal approach. Full article