In this blog I look at the functions of the mental health system as they relate to the economic and social structure of society using Marx’s economic framework. I conclude that the mental health system is essentially a system of care and control, that is legitimated by the concept of mental illness and that plays…
Original article: Vincenzo’s commentary: Part 1 Part 2 For those who have not read my original article, it traces the social functions of the mental health system and its relationship to Capitalism. It suggests the principal functions of this system consist of the public provision of care for those who cannot care for themselves, and…
I was as disappointed as everyone else by the final series of Game of Thrones, but when someone suggested that the programme as a whole was an example of modern moral nihilism, I found myself jumping to its defence. Of course, this person had not actually seen Game of Thrones, because anyone who has…
Peter Hacker is an eminent philosopher and one of the world’s leading authorities on Wittgenstein. He has published a four volume analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations and a brilliant little book on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind, now sadly out of print (1). He is also well known for his debunking of neuroscientific reductionism in…
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
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…
Joanna Moncrieff 