Current and former SSN grants and projects

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a common neurodevelopmental condition thought to affect around 1% of children worldwide, and persisting into adulthood in many cases. As a tic disorder, TS is characterized by multiple motor and one or more vocal tics at some time during the illness, the waxing and waning of tics over a period of more than 1 year, and onset before the age of 18 years. Tics are extremely diverse, ranging from simple motor and vocal tics (e.g. blinking, sniffing) to complex movements and utterances that can appear purposeful. To date most TS research has been patho-physiologically focused on underlying brain mechanisms with little attention directed to the lived experience of patients. This means that treatment of TS has been largely biologically focused, and the characteristic experiences and mode of selfhood at stake have not yet been addressed. To put it another way, philosophy has not yet been heavily involved, despite burgeoning work in phenomenological psychiatry concerning anomalous self-experience, which has given significant attention to the kinds of experiences of selfhood and other-relations in schizophrenia and depression. We propose to build a team across Deakin and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute to set up an interdisciplinary group to better bridge these fields of TS scholarship and enable the first-personal and third-personal dimensions to mutually enrich one another. In addition, we have a proposal for how to effect this change which we want to pilot, juxtaposing both cognitive neuroscience and qualitative phenomenological interviews.

The Team: A/Prof Tim Silk (Lead CI, pictured), Dr Daniel Corp, Jordan Morrison-Ham; Prof Jack Reynolds, Dr Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt, and A/Prof Daryl Efron

A collaboration between the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit, School of Humanities and Social Science, and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute