Philosophical Psychopathology

A benchmark volume for an emerging field where mental disorders serve as the springboard for philosophical insights.

This book uses rare pathologies to inform questions on topics such as consciousness and rationality. Rather than trying to answer these by inventing far-fetched scenario or 'thought experiments', it is better to utilize a rich but under-used clinical resource.

Valerie Gray Hardcastle argues that both professional and lay definitions of pain are wrongheaded -- with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, how psychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/body relationship. Pain, although very common, is little understood. Worse still, according to Valerie Gray Hardcastle, both professional and lay definitions of pain are wrongheaded -- with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, how psychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/body relationship. Hardcastle offers a biologically based complex theory of pain processing, inhibition, and sensation and then uses this theory to make several arguments: (1) psychogenic pains do not exist; (2) a general lack of knowledge about fundamental brain function prevents us from distinguishing between mental and physical causes, although the distinction remains useful; (3) most pain talk should be eliminated from both the folk and academic communities; and (4) such a biological approach is useful generally for explaining disorders in pain processing. She shows how her analysis of pain can serve as a model for the analysis of other psychological disorders and suggests that her project be taken as a model for the philosophical analysis of disorders in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.

Scholars question the extent to which current psychiatric classification systems are inadequate for diagnosis, treatment, and research of mental disorders and offer suggestions for improvement. In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as “oppositional defiance disorder” and pathological gambling. Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar

An exploration of what it means to think about psychiatric disorders as “real,” “true,” and “objective” and the implications for classification and diagnosis. In psychiatry, few question the legitimacy of asking whether a given psychiatric disorder is real; similarly, in psychology, scholars debate the reality of such theoretical entities as general intelligence, superegos, and personality traits. And yet in both disciplines, little thought is given to what is meant by the rather abstract philosophical concept of “real.” Indeed, certain psychiatric disorders have passed from real to imaginary (as in the case of multiple personality disorder) and from imaginary to real (as in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder). In this book, Peter Zachar considers such terms as “real” and “reality”—invoked in psychiatry but often obscure and remote from their instances—as abstract philosophical concepts. He then examines the implications of his approach for psychiatric classification and psychopathology. Proposing what he calls a scientifically inspired pragmatism, Zachar considers such topics as the essentialist bias, diagnostic literalism, and the concepts of natural kind and social construct. Turning explicitly to psychiatric topics, he proposes a new model for the domain of psychiatric disorders, the imperfect community model, which avoids both relativism and essentialism. He uses this model to understand such recent controversies as the attempt to eliminate narcissistic personality disorder from the DSM-5. Returning to such concepts as real, true, and objective, Zachar argues that not only should we use these metaphysical concepts to think philosophically about other concepts, we should think philosophically about them.

Philosophers discuss Jerome Wakefield's influential view of mental disorder as "harmful dysfunction," with detailed responses from Wakefield himself. One of the most pressing theoretical problems of psychiatry is the definition of mental disorder. Jerome Wakefield's proposal that mental disorder is "harmful dysfunction" has been both influential and widely debated; philosophers have been notably skeptical about it. This volume provides the first book-length collection of responses by philosophers to Wakefield's harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA), offering a survey of philosophical critiques as well as extensive and detailed replies by Wakefield himself.

This book is based on a congress evaluating Jaspers' basic psychopathological concepts and their anthropological roots in light of modern research paradigms. It provides a definition of delusion, his concept of "limit situation" so much challenged by trauma research, and his methodological debate. We are approaching the anniversary of Jaspers seminal work General Psychopathology in 1913. The Centre of Psychosocial Medicine of the University with its Psychiatric Hospital where Jaspers wrote this influential volume as a 29 year old clinical assistant hosted a number of international experts familiar with his psychiatric and philosophical work. This fruitful interdisciplinary discussion seems particularly important in light of the renewed interest in Jaspers’ work, which will presumably increase towards the anniversary year 2013. This volume is unique in bringing together the knowledge of leading international scholars and combining three dimensions of investigation that are necessary to understand Jaspers in light of contemporary questions: history (section I), methodology (section II) and application (section III).

Philosophy and psychopathology have more in common than philosophers, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists might think. Three fields of inquiry come to mind: (1) Questions about the scientific status of psychopatho logical statements and claims, (2) ethical questions, and (3) problems regarding the question of how to account for something like a disordered mind. While the first two domains have frequently been addressed in articles and debates (think of the mind-body problem and the problem of institutionalization versus self-determination as examples of issues in the two fields), the question of how the mind should be conceived in order for psychopathology to work best has seldom been discussed. The present volume focuses on this question. Perception, thought, affect, will, and the like are terms which made their way from philosophy into psychology, and into present psychiatry, where disturbances of these "faculties" or "functions" are believed to form the most basic part of symptomatology. While these terms and many others that are used to refer to symptoms of mental disorder (such as "self', "consciousness", "drive", and "identity") may seem to be purely descriptive and theoretically "innocent", they are packed with implicit assumptions, theoretical concepts, and sometimes dogmatic postulates.