Understanding Mental Illness

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

Whenever partial knowledge is considered absolute and turned into ideological and dogmatic conceptions, the risk increases that the conditions for the people involved might become dangerous. This will be illustrated by casuistic examples of consequences of one-sided psychiatric conceptions such as social, biological, and psychological ideas about the treatment and care of the mentally ill. Present perspectives of an integrative model, i.e., an advanced bio-psycho-social conception about evidence-based characteristics on the social, psychological, and molecular-genetic level, require that all of these dimensions should be considered in order to personalize and thereby improve the care and treatment of the mentally ill.

Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics

Contemporary Budhhism, 2012

American Journal of Psychiatry, 2008

Humana.Mente, 2009

This paper argues for psychological realism in the conception of psychiatric disorders. We review the following contemporary ways of understanding the future of psychiatry: (1) psychiatric classification cannot be successfully reduced to neurobiology, and thus psychiatric disorders should not be conceived of as biological kinds; (2) psychiatric classification can be successfully reduced to neurobiology, and thus psychiatric disorders should be conceived of as biological kinds. Position (1) can lead either to instrumentalism or to eliminativism about psychiatry, depending on whether psychiatric classification is regarded as useful. Position (2), which is inspired by the growing interest in neuroscience within scientific psychiatry, leads to biological realism or essentialism. In this paper we endorse a different realist position, which we label psychological realism. Psychiatric disorders are identified and addressed on the basis of their psychological manifestations which are often described as violations of epistemic, moral or social norms. A couple of examples are proposed by reference to the pathological aspects of delusions, and the factors contributing to their formation.

Disputatio, 2011

In this essay, I argue that the meaningful connections Karl Jaspers identifies in his General Psychopathology remain relevant to contemporary psychiatric practice. Though still in its infant stage, the ability to diagnose certain mental illnesses entirely through technological means raises the question of whether clinical evaluations and Jaspersian meaningful connections will continue to have a role in psychiatry. In what follows, I claim that the attempt to think what is traditionally called mental illness or madness entirely in terms of neuro-biochemical arrangements is grounded on a prior commitment to psychologism—the identification of universal and contingent laws of thought with contingent structures—a theory Husserl, in his Logical Investigations, problematizes. To escape the problems associated with psychologism, Husserl proposes that we distinguish between apodictic and contingent structures of experience, that is, between the universal features of all minds and the contingent ways minds manifest themselves. On this model, the mind can be correlated not with contingent but with apodictic structures, such as the ability to carry out meaning-conferring acts, common to the normal and abnormal alike. Therefore, because meaning production is common to all minds and is not a contingent feature, improved technology, and its investigation of contingent physical structures, will not render the search for Jaspersian meaningful connections redundant.