Department of History and Philosophy of Science will hold the 45th Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy. Everyone is welcome.

Date & Time: December 18th (Wednesday), 18:30-20:30
Venue: the 14th Building, Room 710 on the 7th floor, Komaba Campus

Presenter: Yosuke Taniuchi (The University of Tokyo)
Title: Possibility of 'disguised' internal distress in euphoric mania -a phenomenological analysis-

Abstract:
Some people with bipolar disorder, if not all, are considered to experience euphoric mania, which is the object of phenomenological analysis in this paper. Euphoric mania is unique since it is typically reported to be absolutely comfortable states, whereas it is clear that internal distress is associated with the experiences of disphoric or irritable mania and mixed states. However, if we take into consideration recent studies which suggested that mania is in a way similar to depression, for example, tendency for ruminative recollection which predicts depression also shows risk for mania (Johnson et al., 2008), it's still questionable wheather their experience is really "happy" and without any internal distress which, if any, must be "disguised" in the subjective perspective. Here I distinguish internal distress from external one. The latter involves representations of environment or events in the past or future. On the other hand, the former is complete within a first person perspective and essentially at present. If there is internal distress, the awareness of it probably has clinical significance, for many who have experienced euphoric mania are known to be reluctatnt to be cured of it (lack of insight). Phenomenology must be one of the appropriate methodologies to tackle this question and two phenomenological psychopathologists, L. Binswanger and A. Kraus have argued decently on "manic-dipressive disorder." However, their arguments are insufficient in terms of internal distress. The notion of existential feeling introduced by Ratcliffe(2005), I suggest, is apt for explaining it. As we can see at least in some autobiographies, their existential feelings contain certain implicit distress which paradoxically is fueling their energy. Therefore, my hyphothesis is that internal distress still exists in some cases of biplor disorder. This hypothesis has to be examined with more cases in the future studies.