Vampirism as Mental Illness: Myth, Madness and the Loss of Meaning in Psychiatry

This  is certainly the academic paper I have been involved with which has garnered the most media attention. Brendan Kelly and myself intended to write a nuanced paper on how psychiatry conceptualised vampirism, when it occurred as a clinical presentation, and how this changed over time. This reflected wider changes in psychiatry (and probably, though this wasn’t part of the paper, society itself) in that the meaning ascribed to symptoms was increasingly devalued in favour of a “checklisting” approach. Something similar has happened to dreams, in the psychiatric context.

Did we succeed in this? Here is the abstract :

 

Vampirism, as a clinical presentation, was formerly much discussed in psychiatric literature. In recent years this has not been the case. This article begins by exploring the history of vampiric phenomena and the various medical theories of vampirism. It discusses the change in emphasis in psychiatry from a psychotherapeutically-influenced exploration of the meaning of a particular symptom to a more ostensibly evidence-based, checklist approach. This reflects a wider shift in psychiatric culture. Articles from the psychiatric literature dealing with vampirism are reviewed in depth. The article argues that the clinical interpretation of vampirism may be useful as an indicator of shifting attitudes within psychiatric discourse.

And here is how The Sunday Times covered the article:

Perhaps not that surprisingly, this provoked a backlash from the online vampyre community, none of which seemed based on actually reading our article but on the Sunday Times and Irish Central’s even more misleading take. (most of the links to the vampyre forums where we were attacked seem to have broken.

Brendan has talked further about the paper in various forums such as here , and has discussed this media and online reaction.

I know How Journalism Works. I know that the headline is chosen by a subeditor, not the author of the article. I know that “Doctors write nuanced article on changes in how psychiatrists see vampires over time” is not a headline.

In a way, this coverage illustrates that for the media as well as in day to day a life, a psychiatrist is character with a somewhat predetermined role and that, if a psychiatrist is writing about vampirism, it must be through the prism of mental illness and of treatment. Even in cases where the psychiatrist is trying to do the direct opposite. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote (quoted in the blog post linked immediately above):

Contrast the quite different way in which a certain type of social role may embody beliefs so that the ideas, theories and doctrines expressed in and presupposed by the role may at least on some occasions be quite other than the ideas, theories and doctrines believed by the individual who inhabits the role.