IMH Seminar Series - Abnormalities of the self, taking in psychopathology, fiction, cinema, and neuroscience

Abnormalities of the self are some of the most complex and enthralling in psychiatry.  Professor Femi Oyebody aims to talk about autoscopy, delusional misidentification syndromes, and dissociative identity disorder.  He will draw on the representation of these experiences in fiction, cinema and explore our current understanding of autoscopy in neuroscience. 

Femi Oyebode studied medicine at the University of Ibadan, graduating with distinction in 1977. He trained as a psychiatrist in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and has been Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham since 1999. He was Head of Department from 2003 to 2009. He was Chief Examiner, the Royal College of Psychiatrists 2002-2005. His books include Mindreadings: literature and psychiatry, Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind- textbook of descriptive psychopathology 4-7th editions (translated into Arabic, Estonian, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, & Spanish) and Psychopathology of Rare and Unusual Syndromes. His volumes of poetry include Naked to Your Softness & other dreams, Wednesday is a Colour, Forest of Transformations, Master of the Leopard Hunt, and others. Jointly with Horatio Clare he presented two series of BBC Radio 4 Is Psychiatry Working? He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2016 and the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (the highest honour of the RCPsych) in 2019.

This Seminar is free to attend and is open to all.  Registration in advance is required for both online and in-person attendance.