Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...) diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 1 Seiten: 243-266.

Psychiatry presents a unique array of difficult ethical questions. However, a major challenge is to approach psychiatry in a way that does justice to the real ethical issues. Recently there has been a growing body of research in empirical psychiatric ethics, and an increased interest in how empirical and philosophical methods can be combined. Empirical Ethics in Psychiatry demonstrates how ethics can engage more closely with the reality of psychiatric practice and shows how empirical methodologies from the social sciences can (...) help foster this link. -/- The book is divided into two sections. In the first section there are discussions of the possibility of empirical ethics from a theoretical standpoint and an overview of the history of empirical medical ethics in general. The second, larger section is made up of chapters, discussing specific research projects in empirical psychiatric ethics. The contributors reflect on their choice of method: how and why they combine empirical and philosophical work, and how the two approaches relate to each other. The chapters in the second part thus have two purposes. The first is to present examples of empirical ethics in psychiatry; the second is to reflect on the way in which empirical research can support ethical analysis. -/- Empirical Ethics in Psychiatry is a unique contribution to bioethics and will be fascinating reading for all those working within the field, as well as mental health care professionals. (shrink)

L'oeuvre d'Henri Maldiney (1912-2013) occupe aujourd'hui une place de premier ordre dans le paysage philosophique. Lors même qu'il n'a que tardivement publié son premier ouvrage, Regard Parole Espace, en 1973, le profond renouvellement qu'il a su introduire au sein de la phénoménologie a obligé philosophes, mais aussi psychiatres ou théoriciens de l'oeuvre d'art, à repenser leurs concepts comme leurs pratiques. C'est là ce que ces études, initialement issues d'un colloque interdisciplinaire, entendent méditer. Elles abordent aussi bien la place qui est (...) celle de Maldiney au sein de la tradition philosophique, qu'elles réfléchissent à l'impact de sa pensée sur le traitement des questions psychiatriques et esthétiques. (shrink)

In _ Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, _Dominic Murphy looks at psychiatry from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy of science, considering three issues: how we should conceive of, classify, and explain mental illness. If someone is said to have a mental illness, what about it is mental? What makes it an illness? How might we explain and classify it? A system of psychiatric classification settles these questions by distinguishing the mental illnesses and showing how they stand in relation to one (...) another. This book explores the philosophical issues raised by the project of explaining and classifying mental illness. Murphy argues that the current literature on mental illness -- exemplified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- is an impediment to research; it lacks a coherent concept of the mental and a satisfactory account of disorder, and yields too much authority to commonsense thought about the mind. He argues that the explanation of mental illness should meet the standards of good explanatory practice in the cognitive neurosciences, and that the classification of mental disorders should group symptoms into conditions based on the causal structure of the normal mind. (shrink)

Psychiatrisches Handeln sieht sich in besonderem Maße dem Risiko dogmatischer Einengung ausgesetzt. Schon dies stellt eine Parallele zu Fichte dar, dessen Wissenschaftslehre es ja auch wesentlich um die Kritik an unbegründeten erkenntnistheoretischen Vorurteilen, also an dogmatischen Fassungen von Theorien, ging. Seine - und auch schon vor ihm Kants - Transzendentalphilosophie wandte sich gegen das idealistische Dogma, nur der Geist als absolut freies Wirken sei von Bedeutung, und gegen das realistische Dogma, die Welt bestehe aus »real« außer uns und unabhängig von (...) uns existierenden Dingen, die wir zwar erkennend abbilden können und sollen, die wir aber dadurch nicht beeinflussen und schon gar nicht wesentlich mit konstituieren. Dieser Zusammenhang ist an anderer Stelle näher ausgeführt worden. (shrink)

Psychiatrisches Handeln sieht sich in besonderem Maße dem Risiko dogmatischer Einengung ausgesetzt. Schon dies stellt eine Parallele zu Fichte dar, dessen Wissenschaftslehre es ja auch wesentlich um die Kritik an unbegründeten erkenntnistheoretischen Vorurteilen, also an dogmatischen Fassungen von Theorien, ging. Seine - und auch schon vor ihm Kants - Transzendentalphilosophie wandte sich gegen das idealistische Dogma, nur der Geist als absolut freies Wirken sei von Bedeutung, und gegen das realistische Dogma, die Welt bestehe aus »real« außer uns und unabhängig von (...) uns existierenden Dingen, die wir zwar erkennend abbilden können und sollen, die wir aber dadurch nicht beeinflussen und schon gar nicht wesentlich mit konstituieren. Dieser Zusammenhang ist an anderer Stelle näher ausgeführt worden. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 2 Seiten: 320-325.

The need for a model -- Currently available models in psychiatry -- Introduction to enactivism -- Body and mind - and world -- The existential dimension and its role in psychiatry -- Enriched enactivism : existential sense-making, values, and socio-cultural worlds -- Enactive psychiatry : psychiatric disorders are disorders of sense-making -- An enactive approach to causes, diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Psychiatry is increasingly dominated by the reductionist claim that mental illness is caused by neurobiological abnormalities such as chemical imbalances in the brain. Critical psychiatry does not believe that this is the whole story and proposes a more ethical foundation for practice. This book describes an original framework for renewing mental health services in alliance with people with mental health problems. It is an advance over the polarization created by the "anti-psychiatry" of the past.

Psychiatry widely assumes an internalist biomedical model of mental illness. I argue that many of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories involve an implicit commitment to constitutive externalism about mental illness. Some of these categories are socially externalist in nature.