Summary: The treatment of mental disorders with drugs is not the same sort of activity as the use of drugs in medicine. Psychiatric drugs do not target underlying disease or symptom-producing mechanisms; they create an altered state of mental functioning that is superimposed on underlying feelings and behaviours. The ethical implications of the two situations…
Looking at the history of the mental health system reveals the social functions it continues to fulfil and enables us to think about how we might address them more fairly and transparently
The extraordinary media hype over the latest meta-analysis of antidepressants puts the discussion of these drugs back years. Despite the fact that 9% of the UK population are taking antidepressants (1), and rates of prescribing have doubled over the last decade (2), the authors of the analysis are calling for yet more prescribing. John Geddes…
So if mental disorders are not bodily diseases, as I argued in the last blog, what are they and how should we understand them? I realised trying to write this and the next two (and last) blogs how much more difficult it is to set out a positive notion of what mental disorder consists…
In this blog I look at the argument that mental disorders are brain diseases just like multiple sclerosis or dementia
In this blog I want to come back to the work of Thomas Szasz. The last two blogs argue that bodily states and processes need to be understood in a different way from the way we understand what human beings think and do. Mental ‘illness’ consists of things that people say and do. For Szasz,…
The human body is a material object that is part of the natural world. It is a uniquely personal part of the natural world, but it is a physical substance nonetheless. How it functions internally and how it responds to external phenomena are governed by the principles of living matter, which are the subject…
Wittgenstein illustrates that mental states are not private, universally identical brain processes or mental events. They are manifested in, and characterised by socially meaningful, recognisable patterns of human behaviour. We can never understand or know such states by looking in the brain or constructing models or theories of what particular mental states consist of and…
There are two broad approaches to the ‘mental’ that Wittgenstein’s ideas challenge. One is that all our feelings, thoughts and behaviours are caused by, or ‘epiphenomena’ of, a specific brain state or process. This is sometimes referred to as ‘physicalism’ (‘epiphenomenalism’ being one variant of physicalism). On this view- the one that much neuroscience is…
This is the first of a series of blogs presenting a philosophical analysis of the modern mental health system and what it is concerned with. 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, much of whose later work concerns our thinking about the ‘mind’, suggested that the role of philosophy is to identify and clear-up conceptual confusions. Many…
Joanna Moncrieff 