User:Values Based Practice/sandbox/Prof. Giovanni Stanghellini

Professor Giovanni Stanghellini
Prof. Giovanni Stanghellini, MD and Dr. Phil honoris causa is Professor of Dynamic Psychology and Psychopathology at “G. d’Annunzio” University (Chieti, Italy) and Director of the post-gradutate School of Phenomenological-Dynamic Psychotherapy in Florence. He specializes in severe mental disorders, philosophy and psychiatry and philosophy of mental health care. He has been a visiting researcher and professor in Heidelberg, Copenhagen and Santiago, where he is Profesor Adjuncto since 2013.

He founded and chairs the European Psychiatric Association Section of Philosophy and Psychiatry, the International Network of Philosophy of Psychiatry (with KWM Fulford and JZ Sadler) and has served as chairperson to the World Psychiatry Association Section Psychiatry and the Humanities till the year 2017.

He also founded (with KWM Fulford and JZ Sadler) the Oxford University Press Series International Perspective in Philosophy and Psychiatry.

Prof. Stanghellini has been published widely, in English, Italian and French. As a researcher, he is especially known for his contributions in the area of schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorders and eating disorder, including the phenomenological characterization of the life-worlds people affected by these disorders live by in their everyday existence.

Life and career

Giovanni Stanghellini was born in Siena (Italy) on July 29, 1960. He qualified as a doctor in medicine and specialized in Psychiatry at Florence University. He worked as a consultant psychiatrist from 1990 untill 2004 at the Mental Health Services of Florence before he became professor in Chieti. He is now a psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in Florence. Since the early 1990s, Stanghellini has been studying philosophy next to psychopathology contributing to the growing discipline of philosophy of psychiatry – with the aim of understanding everyday existence of people affected by mental disorders not only in clinical but also in philosophical and anthropological terms. The overall programme of his research and practice is to find an answer to the question What it is like to suffer from mental disorders?

In 1995 he spent a trimester at the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg University where he contributed to reaserch on the vulnerability to major depression (melancholic type of personality).

In 2003 he spent one year at the Psychiatric Clinic in Copenhagen University. In this period he completed his monograph Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies (Oxford University Press) on schizophrenia and manic-depression as disorders of common sense.

Since 2013 he is Profesor Adjuncto at “D. Portales” University (Centro de Estudios de Fenomenologia) in Santiago Chile.

He teaches Dymanic Psychology and Psychopathology at Chieti University and in several other psychiatric institutions, facilities and post-graduate courses for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists in Italy and abroad.

Research and teaching activities

Life-World Project

Prof. Stanghellini cooperates in an International project called Life-World Project, involving several institutions and researchers all over the world, whose aim is the description of the “worlds” inhabited by persons affected by severe mental disorders. His main interests are the ways these persons experience time, space, their own body and other persons, as well as their emotions and values.

Phenomenological-Dynamic Psychotherapy

Building on and extending the legacies of clinical phenomenology, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis he developed a method for psychotherapy called the P.H.D., providing the practical guidelines for performing phenomenological-dynamic psychotherapy. The practice of care that derives from this is based on the integration of three basic dispositives, synthesised in the acronym P.H.D. – bringing together Phenomenology (systematic knowledge of the abnormal phenomena that affect the patient.), Hermeneutics (grasping the way the patient interprets or makes sense of his own experiences) and Psycho-dynamics (tracing back the patient’s experiences and actions and her world-view to the life-history in which they are embedded).