Twenty years ago, the biopsychosocial model was proposed by George Engel to be the new paradigm for medicine and psychiatry. The model assumed a hierarchical structure of the biological, psychological and social system and simple interactions between the participating systems. This article holds the thesis that the original biopsychosocial model cannot depict psychiatry's reality and problems. The clinical validity of the biopsychosocial model has to be questioned. It is argued that psychiatric interventions can only stimulate but not determine their target (...) systems, because intervention and outcome are only loosely coupled. Thus, psychiatric interventions have in principle limited ranges which differ according to the type of intervention and according to the system to be stimulated. Psychosocial interventions face far more obstacles to be overcome than psychopharmacogical therapy. (shrink)

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder is a dissociative syndrome characterized by a sense of disconnectedness from one’s own self and the world around. People suffering from the condition report feeling like external observers, cut off from their own bodies, emotions and thoughts; their surroundings are perceived as unreal. The present thesis analyses DDD by sustaining the view that its phenomenology can be understood through Metzinger’s notion of phenomenal transparency. This idea is not entirely new: recent contributions have framed the dramatic experiences of depersonalization (...) and derealization as instances of highly opaque mental states. However, more detailed discussions of phenomenal transparency are sparse. My contribution wishes to partially fill in this gap. To elucidate the concept of transparency, I will first highlight the distinction between the classical representationalist notion of transparency and the metzingerian, phenomenal account of it. I will then argue that phenomenal transparency adequately describes the associated depersonalized phenomenology. Finally, I will attempt to present and dissipate ambiguities contained in the concept and address potential criticism regarding the redundancy of transparency as an explanatory tool for dissociative phenomena. (shrink)