Philosophy Of Psychiatry: Companion, A

Description:
This is a comprehensive resource of original essays by leading thinkers exploring the newly emerging inter-disciplinary field of the philosophy of psychiatry. The contributors aim to define this exciting field and to highlight the philosophical assumptions and issues that underlie psychiatric theory and practice, the category of mental disorder, and rationales for its social, clinical and legal treatment. As a branch of medicine and a healing practice, psychiatry relies on presuppositions that are deeply and unavoidably philosophical. Conceptions of rationality, personhood and autonomy frame our understanding and treatment of mental disorder. Philosophical questions of evidence, reality, truth, science, and values give meaning to each of the social institutions and practices concerned with mental health care. The psyche, the mind and its relation to the body, subjectivity and consciousness, personal identity and character, thought, will, memory, and emotions are equally the stuff of traditional philosophical inquiry and of the psychiatric enterprise. A new research field--the philosophy of psychiatry--began to form during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Prompted by a growing recognition that philosophical ideas underlie many aspects of clinical practice, psychiatric theorising and research, mental health policy, and the economics and politics of mental health care, academic philosophers, practitioners, and philosophically trained psychiatrists have begun a series of vital, cross-disciplinary exchanges. This volume provides a sampling of the research yield of those exchanges. Leading thinkers in this area, including clinicians, philosophers, psychologists, and interdisciplinary teams, provide original discussions that are not only expository and critical, but also a reflection of their authors' distinctive and often powerful and imaginative viewpoints and theories. All the discussions break new theoretical ground. As befits such an interdisciplinary effort, they are methodologically eclectic, and varied and divergent in their assumptions and conclusions; together, they comprise a significant new exploration, definition, and mapping of the philosophical aspects of psychiatric theory and practice.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; PART I - PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND NORMALCY; 1. Cognition: Brain Pain: Psychotic Cognition, Hallucination and Delusions; 2. Affectivity: Depression and Mania; 3. Desire: Paraphilias and Distress in DSM-IV; 4. Character: Moral Treatment and the Personality Disorders; 5. Action: Volitional Disorder and Addiction; 6. Self-ascription: Though Insertion; 7. Memory: The Nature and Significance of Dissociation; 8. Body: Disorders of Embodiment; 9. Identity: Personal Identity, Character Identity and Mental Disorder; 10. Development: Disorders of Childhood and Youth; PART 2 - EPISTEMOLOGY OF PRACTICE; 11. Diagnosis / Anti-Diagnosis; 12. Understanding / Explanation; 13. Reductionism / Anti-Reductionism; 14. Facts / Values: Ten Principles of Values-based Medicine; PART 3 - NORMS, VALUES AND ETHICS; 15. Gender; 16. Race and Culture; 17. Competence; 18. Dangerousness and 'the General Duty to All the World'; 19. Treatment and Research Ethics; 20. Criminal Responsibility; 21. Religion; PART 4 - THEORETICAL MODELS; 22. Darwinian: Darwinian Models of Psychotherapy; 23. Psychoanalytic: Freud's Debt to Philosophy and his Copernican Revolution; 24. Phenomenological: Hermeneutics, Understanding and Interpretation in Psychiatry; 25. Neurobiological; 26. Cognitive-Behavioral: Cognitive-behavior Therapy; 27. Social Constructionist; PART 5 - CIRCUMSCRIBING MENTAL DISORDER; 28. Benchmarks for Psychiatric Concepts; 29. Defining Mental Disorder; 30. Mental Health and Its Limits