Interview with Dr. Jan Kalbitzer, author of the "Twitter Psychosis" article

Today I'm chatting with Dr. Jan Kabitzer, a Physician and Leader of the Neurochemistry Research Group at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.Dr. Kabitzer is first author of the “Twitter Psychosis” article that made international news and took social media by storm on August 6, 2014. His provocatively titled paper, “Twitter Psychosis: A Rare Variation or a Distinct Syndrome?” (Kalbitzer et al., 2014), appeared online a week earlier in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. I was struck by the title, of course, and an abstract claiming that “Twitter may have a high potential to induce psychosis in predisposed users.”I wrote a critical blog post on July 31, 2014 (Twitter Psychosis as a Cultural Artifact) arguing that Twitter resembles other technologies and cultural artifacts that can potentially influence the phenomenology of delusions, citing the work of Vaughan Bell and colleagues (Bell et al., 2005).It is now August 10, and the media huff has died down a bit. The overarching narrative of this story is very meta —  social media about social media. It is in this spirit that I present the interview. 1 Q: Could you tell me a little about your clinical work and your research?Since my Ph.D. in Copenhagen at the Neurobiology Research Unit from 2007 to 2009 I have been working clinically at the psychiatric department of the Charité Berlin to specialize in psychiatry. Most of the time I worked on an acute psychiatric ward. We do have some time for researc...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs