Tag: philosophy and psychiatry
Is Madness an Evolved Signal? Justin Garson on Strategy Versus Dysfunction
Philosopher Justin Garson discusses the potential benefit of looking at madness not as disease or defect, but as a designed feature.
Responsibility Without Blame in Therapeutic Communities: Interview with Philosopher Hanna Pickard
Hanna Pickard on the elusive middle ground between personal responsibility and systemic factors in our understandings of addiction.
Mental Health and Emotion in the Digital Age: An Interview with...
MIA's Tim Beck interviews psychologist Ian Tucker about the relationships between digital technologies, emotion, and mental health.
Bridging Critical and Conceptual Psychiatry: An Interview with Awais Aftab
MIAâs Justin Karter interviews psychiatrist Awais Aftab about how âconceptual competenceâ uses philosophy to transform psychiatry.
Observations From an Open Circle
Incorporating philosophical debate into psychiatric care forces us to confront the assumptions of therapy. Many "progressive" psychiatric institutions may have been built on solid foundations revolutionary for their time, yet they run the risk of coming to a standstill without continuous and vehement debate.
Can a Conceptual Competence Curriculum Bring Humility to Psychiatry?
Training for conceptual competence in psychiatry provides a new way forward to address theoretical and philosophical issues in mental health research and practice.
The Problems with the DSM Mask a Dark Reality We’re All...
It would be comforting to conclude that the people in charge of such projects as the DSM are perhaps a little sociopathic or deviously immoral. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. We are all inextricably bound to, and complicit in, the problem we are attacking.
Psychiatrist Offers Ecological Model for Psychotherapy
Insights from phenomenological philosophy can assist in understanding psychotherapy and psychopathology as ecological rather than individualistic.
On Human Nature and Its Implications for the Mind-Body Problem
Peter Hacker's magnum opus explores what it means to be human via an analysis of the language we use. Through disclosing the conceptual framework within which we think, act and come to know things, our deep and implicit understanding of ourselves and our world is revealed.
So What is Mental Disorder? Part 2: The Social Problem
The English Workhouse was designed to deter people from seeking state assistance, and Victorian asylums were designed to care for poor people whose behaviour was disruptive to Workhouse routines. Madness, previously viewed as an interesting, if inconvenient, manifestation of humanity, came to be seen as a social problem in need of correction.
So What is Mental Disorder? Part 1: Reasoning and Meaning
If mental disorders are not bodily diseases, what are they and how should we understand them? If madness involves a loss or failure of shared reasoning that places the individual outside of the community of immediate and implicit human understanding, does this mean it is without interest or meaning?
Badiou, the Event, and Psychiatry, Part 2
In the second part of a two-part series on philosophy and psychiatry, Vincenzo Di Nicola describes an alternative model of psychiatry that rejects some of...
Badiou, the Event, and Psychiatry, Part 1: Trauma and Event
In this piece for the Blog of the APA, Vincenzo Di Nicola critiques the scientism and methodolatry of contemporary psychiatry, and emphasizes the need for psychiatry...
Dualism and the Mind-Body âProblemâ
The proposal that there are differences in the way we understand the human body and human activity seems to make people particularly uneasy. It is often misunderstood as illustrating the âmind-body problem,â and held up as an example of the great crime of âdualism.â
Knowledge of Mental States and Behaviour: Insights From Heidegger and Others
Applying the methods of natural science to human activity is sometimes necessary, but it cannot enlighten us about the nature of that activity or the reasons that motivate and sustain it. Instead, insights must come from our own and othersâ experiences.
How Should We Think About Mental States? The Contribution of Wittgenstein
The important point that Wittgenstein makes is that mental states, including mental disorders like depression or psychosis, are not just private events â we understand them through the public expressions by which they are manifested.
Why Philosophy Matters?
Whole social systems depend on the assumption that what we call âmental illnessâ or âmental disorderâ (a piggy-back term) originates in the body. In particular, this notion is fundamental to the current social response to certain forms of behaviour, and to processes for allocating resources for assistance or welfare.
Forgetting Fanon, Remembering Fanon
In this piece for Verso Books, David Macey discusses the legacy of Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, in honor of his 92nd birthday.
“Psychiatry and the Humanities”: Postgraduate Course
From the American Philosophical Association: A pioneering course called "Psychiatry and the Humanities" for postgraduate students at the University of Montreal has been nominated for the...
The Power Thinker
In this essay for Aeon, Kolin Coopman explores the impact and legacy of Michel Foucault.
"It was a bio-power wielded by psychiatrists and doctors that,...
Call For Abstracts: Philosophical Perspectives on Critical Psychiatry
The Association for Advancement in Philosophy and Psychiatry is issuing a call for abstracts, with a particular interest in submissions from service users. The...
Consciousness is “Not Just Your Brainâ
For NPRâs 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, philosopher Alva NoĂ« comments on a new Oxford journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness. He is skeptical of the persistent tendency of some neuroscientists âto think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.â His own view, he writes âis that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation.â
ABC Radio: Can Philosophy Prevent Overdiagnosis?
Professor Wendy Rogers believes that overdiagnosis itself is an epidemic and that the roots of the problem lie in an insufficient naturalistic disease-theory. Overdiagnosis, she adds, âcan be harmful for the patient and also cause waste of a lot of resources.â
âFixing the Brain is Not the New World for Psychiatryâ
Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbertâs piece on âWhy can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?â in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,â he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.