What Is Mental Disorder

With a new edition of the 'bibles' of psychiatric diagnosis - the ICD and DSM - under development, it is timely to take a step back and evaluate how we diagnose and define mental disorder. This new book by Derek Bolton tackles the problems involved in the definition and boundaries of mental disorder.

Mental, neurological, and substance use disorders are common, highly disabling, and associated with significant premature mortality. The impact of these disorders on the social and economic well-being of individuals, families, and societies is large, growing, and underestimated. Despite this burden, these disorders have been systematically neglected, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, with pitifully small contributions to scaling up cost-effective prevention and treatment strategies. Systematically compiling the substantial existing knowledge to address this inequity is the central goal of this volume. This evidence-base can help policy makers in resource-constrained settings as they prioritize programs and interventions to address these disorders.

Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.

"This book reflects anthropology's growing encounter with the key "pysch" disciplines (psychology and psychiatry) in theorizing and researching mental illness treatment and recovery. Khan summarizes new approaches to mental illness, situating them in the context of historical, political, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial approaches, and encouraging readers to understand how health, illness, normality, and abnormality is constructed and produced. Using case studies from a variety of regions, Khan explores what anthropologically informed psychology/psychiatry/medicine can tell us about mental illness across cultures."--

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.

According to a major health survey, nearly half of all Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives—more than a quarter in the last year. Can this be true? What exactly does it mean, anyway? What’s a disorder, and what’s just a struggle with real life? This lucid and incisive book cuts through both professional jargon and polemical hot air, to describe the intense political and intellectual struggles over what counts as a “real” disorder, and what goes into the “DSM,” the psychiatric bible. Is schizophrenia a disorder? Absolutely. Is homosexuality? It was—till gay rights activists drove it out of the DSM a generation ago. What about new and controversial diagnoses? Is “social anxiety disorder” a way of saying that it’s sick to be shy, or “female sexual arousal disorder” that it’s sick to be tired? An advisor to the DSM, but also a fierce critic of exaggerated overuse, McNally defends the careful approach of describing disorders by patterns of symptoms that can be seen, and illustrates how often the system medicalizes everyday emotional life. Neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology may illuminate the biological bases of mental illness, but at this point, McNally argues, no science can draw a bright line between disorder and distress. In a pragmatic and humane conclusion, he offers questions for patients and professionals alike to help understand, and cope with, the sorrows and psychopathologies of everyday life.