Description
This event will explore the crucial role of loss and mourning in mental illness bridging psychoanalytic and psychiatric perspectives on mental disorder. Through case vignettes from extensive psychiatric experience, we will explore the Psychological factors, underlying the development of mental illness, manifest in this particular way at this point in an individuals life.
Understanding the important role of loss and mourning in a wide variety of psychiatric disorders provides a basis for engagement with the inner world of patients and thus comprehending different manifestations of distress. Identification of the underlying loss event that underpins the illness can facilitate therapeutic engagement and resolution.
The basis for this discussion will be the recent paper The Mourning Process and its Importance in Mental Illness: a Psychoanalytic understanding of psychiatric diagnosis and classification https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-advances/article/mourning-process-and-its-importance-in-mental-illness-a-psychoanalytic-understanding-of-psychiatric-diagnosis-and-classification/AADC76B72F52556A897A41B131A25D37
Dr Rachel Gibbons has worked in the NHS over the past 20 years in various psychiatric settings as a consultant psychiatrist and consultant medical psychotherapist. She is a psychoanalyst and group analyst and current Co-Chair of the Patient Safety Group, Chair of the Working Group on the Effect of Suicide and Homicide on Psychiatrists and Vice-Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty, at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She has been working on suicide over the last 14 years publishing several papers on this topic most recently ‘eight truths about suicide’https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/eight-truths-about-suicide/36D1872261E290945E245143BECC6260 . She is focused on the role of loss and mourning in suicide and mental illness.
