The Existential Dispatch, Issue No. 31

A Word from the Founding Director

This issue begins with a discipline that is easy to name and difficult to practise: noticing what our habits of attention leave out. Laing’s warning about unnoticed assumptions meets new work on existential health, lived experience in patient safety, and the cultural work of documenting illness and mortality. Across these domains, care becomes more trustworthy when it makes room for the person who cannot be reduced to the category in front of us.

Existential Thinker of the Issue

R. D. Laing

R. D. Laing (1927–1989), Scottish psychiatrist and existentially oriented thinker, asked how apparently private distress is shaped by relationships, institutions, and the social worlds in which people must live. His reminder is both epistemic and clinical: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

R. D. Laing quotation source: en.wikiquote.org

Clinically, this is a case for reflective attention before intervention. A diagnosis, risk assessment, or safety protocol may be necessary, but it can also make some realities harder to see: fear that is expressed indirectly, the meaning of exclusion, the patient’s account of belonging, or the staff member’s own adaptation to danger. Laing’s point is not that observation solves suffering; it is that care cannot change what it has not learned to notice.

In Academia

Existential health as a public concern

Jim Palmer’s July 2026 article in Existential Analysis proposes existential health as a fourth domain of human flourishing, alongside the familiar physical, psychological, and social dimensions. Its language of mortality, groundlessness, isolation, meaning, belonging, and ecological embeddedness offers a useful conceptual bridge between existential scholarship and public health. journal.existentialanalysis.org.uk

Existential quality of life in chronic illness

A PLOS Mental Health report from the eMPower randomised trial, published August 19, examines interconnections across physical, psychological, existential, and health-related quality-of-life outcomes in adults with chronic medical conditions. The study is a reminder that “existential” need not be an ornamental adjective: it can be part of the patient-reported architecture of illness. journals.plos.org

In Film, Literature and Culture

Barbara Hammer, mortality, and the life of an image

Sundance’s September release guide notes that Barbara Forever, Brydie O’Connor’s documentary portrait of filmmaker Barbara Hammer, comes to select theatres September 4. Following Hammer’s art, relationships, body, and mortality after an ovarian-cancer diagnosis, the film asks how a life can remain formally and politically alive while confronting finitude. sundance.org

In Healthcare (Global)

Patient safety as lived experience

The World Health Organization’s Global Webinar for World Patient Safety Day 2026 takes place September 9 under the slogan “Safe care for life!” It brings people with lived experience together with policymakers, health leaders, practitioners, civil society, and international partners to consider unsafe care in noncommunicable disease services. The existential question is direct: who is allowed to remain visible when systems measure safety? who.int

Funding and Grant Opportunities

Canadian Cancer Society deadlines

The Canadian Cancer Society’s current opportunities page lists the Investigator-Initiated Clinical Trials Program, administered by the Cancer Research Society, with a September 16, 2026 deadline at 11:59 p.m. EST, and Summit Discovery Grants 2026 with a September 23 deadline at 5:00 p.m. EST. Read the eligibility and abstract-registration requirements before preparing a submission. cancer.ca

AACR cancer-research opportunities

AACR lists open opportunities with deadlines on September 10 for Invasive Lobular Carcinoma Research Challenge Grants, September 22 for the Cancer Prevention Research Fellowship, and September 29 for the Digital Pathology and AI Training fellowship. The range is a useful reminder that cancer scholarship includes prevention, equity, clinical research, and technical capability—not only therapeutics. aacr.org

Conferences and Events

Education in Palliative and End-of-Life Care

Northwestern’s EPEC Annual Chicago Conferences run September 24–26, 2026, with a vision of a healthcare system in which all patients receive the primary palliative care they need. For existentially informed practice, the educational question is how clinicians learn to stay present to uncertainty, suffering, and the limits of cure. bioethics.northwestern.edu

Supportive and palliative care in practice

MD Anderson’s 29th Supportive and Palliative Care Clinical and Research Symposium is scheduled for September 18–19, 2026, as a live virtual course. Its focus on compassionate, high-quality palliative and end-of-life care makes it a timely meeting point for clinical skill, research, and the moral texture of accompaniment. mdanderson.cloud-cme.com

Startup and Innovation Watch

Making mental-health innovation answerable

The Mental Health Innovation Showcase returns to London on September 15, 2026, convening innovators, investors, regulators, insurers, and care leaders; five start-ups will present their work. Its most interesting premise is that innovation should be demonstrated, challenged, and refined with the people responsible for delivering and adopting care—not simply announced to them. harleystreethealthdistrict.com

To Close: An Existential Joke

Why did the clinician keep a notebook beside the treatment plan?

Because the most dangerous blind spot is the one that never makes it into the chart.