Silence is frequently considered negative or harmful in both everyday life – for example, when we are silenced – as well as in psychiatry, where poverty of speech is a symptom of depression and pressure of speech is a symptom of mania. In Silence in Mood Disorders: A Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2027), Dan Degerman argues for the need to consider silence in mental disorders in a nuanced way that recognizes different forms of silence and different, including positive, ways silences of speech and inner speech can be experienced. The poverty of speech in depression may lead to the fetishizing of silence-breaking that can cause more distress to a patient who simply does not have anything they want to say, while the pressure of speech in mania may involve disruption in a multicomponent capacity to reliably initiate and maintain silence that is usually habitual and occasionally deliberate. Degerman, who is a research fellow at the University of Bristol on the Epistemic Injustice in Health Care Project, provides an analysis of different types of silence, discusses first-person experiences of being silent in depression and mania, and points to ways in which philosophers and clinicians can enrich their understandings and practices involving silences.

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It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.

Laurence J. Kirmayer is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

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Does God exist? This straightforward question has spawned endless debate, ranging from apologists’ supposed proofs of God’s existence to New Atheist manifestos declaring belief in God a harmful delusion. In Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species (Prometheus Books, 2024), Will M. Gervais, a global leader in the psychological study of atheism, shows that the ubiquity of religious belief and the peculiarities of atheism are connected pieces in the puzzle of human nature.

Through a firsthand account of breakthroughs in the scientific study of atheism, including key findings from cognitive science, cultural evolution, and evolutionary psychology, Disbelief forces a rethinking of the prevailing theories of religion and reminds both believers and atheists of the shared psychologies that set them on their distinct religious trajectories.

Having grown up in the mountains of Colorado, and going to school there and later in Vancouver, Will Gervais today is a Reader in Psychology in the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London, and Programme Lead for Brunel’s Culture and Evolution MSc Programme.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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