Tag: philosophy of psychiatry

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews the well-known sociologist of medicine, Nikolas Rose, about the role psychiatry plays in shaping how we manage ourselves and our world.

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.

Dr. Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, discusses the importance of personal narratives and service-user activism in the context of the global mental health movement.

From Verso: A televised 1965 discussion between Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault, under the heading "Philosophy and Psychology," is available to stream in three parts. Videos →­

Proponents of the idea that mental disorders are brain diseases argue that even though we may not have discovered the underlying pathology of mental disorders like schizophrenia or depression yet, surely we eventually will? Mental disorders, on this view, can be thought of as brain diseases ‘in waiting.’

If you loosen the association between the concepts of illness and disease and the body, the words cease to have any discriminative power. They are no longer able to pick out a particular category of unwanted situations and become synonymous with generic terms like ‘problem’ or ‘difficulty’. They become meaningless.

Psychiatrist, psychologist and philosopher Vincenzo Di Nicola examines the history and logic of anti-psychiatry movements. “What is intriguing about these figures is how they proceed by negation," Di Nicola writes in The Journal of the International Association of Transdisciplinary Psychology. “Each figure has a key critical negation that marks their resistance.”

This week’s Philosophy Bites podcast with David Edmonds discusses the philosophical problems inherent in psychiatry and our mental disorder diagnostic symptoms. “Are mental disorders like other illnesses? Can they be adequately categorised in relation to a set of symptoms? Steven E. Hyman discusses some philosophical questions that arise from the widely-used DSM-5.”

“If language is inherently unstable, then how can we hope to diagnose illness accurately?” asks psychiatrist Mark Salter in an article for iai news. “Naming things, abstract or concrete, is a form of categorization,” but, he adds, “it is important to remember that our categories say more about the categorizer than the categorized.”

A New York Times Op-Ed by Cornell psychiatry professor George Makari connects the surprise over the results of the widely-covered RAISE study to American psychiatry’s shift toward pharmacology and the oversimplification of disorders as brain diseases.