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...

Philosophical ideas about the mind, brain, and behavior can seem theoretical and unimportant when placed alongside the urgent questions of mental distress and disorder. However, there is a need to give direction to attempts to answer these questions. On the one hand a substantial research effort in going into the investigation of brain processes and the development of drug treatments for psychiatric disorders, and on the other, a wide range of psychotherapies is becoming available to adults and children with mental health problems. These two strands reflect traditional distinctions between...

A new volume in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry series, this book will be of great interest to all those working with sufferers from such disorders - helping them to better understand their mental lives and providing important insights into how best to treat them.

Nature and Narrative is the launch volume in a new series of books entitled International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry. The series will aim to build links between the sciences and humanities in psychiatry. Our ability to decipher mental disorders depends to a unique extent on both the sciences and the humanities, science provides insight into the 'causes' of a problem, enabling us to formulate an 'explanation', and the humanities provides insight into its 'meanings' and helps with our 'understanding'. Psychiatry, if it to develop as a balanced discipline, must draw on input from...

The public, mental health consumers, as well as mental health practitioners wonder about what kinds of values mental health professionals hold, and what kinds of values influence psychiatric diagnosis. Are mental disorders socio-political, practical, or scientific concepts? Is psychiatric diagnosis value-neutral? What role does the fundamental philosophical question "How should I live?" play in mental health care? In his carefully nuanced and exhaustively referenced monograph, psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry John Z. Sadler describes the manifold kinds of values and value judgements...

Despite the currency of the notion of mental illness, there are those who take the radical sceptical line that mental illness is a fabrication. This book provides an evaluation of the traditional philosophical disputes about the existence and nature of mental illness.

Drawing on a variety of philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Hume, Wittgenstein, this book explores the nature of personal identity in dementia. It shows how the lives and selfhood of people with dementia can be enhanced by attention to their psychosocial and spiritual environment. It is written by leading figures in psychiatry and philosophy.

How should we deal with mental disorder - as an "illness" like diabetes or bronchitis, as a "problem in living," or what? This book seeks to answer such questions by going to their roots, in philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind, the ways in which it can be understood, and about the nature and aims of scientific medicine. The controversy over the nature of mental disorder and the appropriateness of the "medical model" is not just an abstract theoretical debate: it has a bearing on very practical issues of appropriate treatment, as well as on psychiatric ethics and law. A...

People do great wrongs to each other all the time, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. This book looks at how people, communities, and nations can address great wrongs and how they can heal from them- taking into consideration how differences in cultures, histories, and group expectations affect the possibilities for healing.

Rationality and Compulsion presents a unique examination of mental illness - derived from philosophical action theory. Delusion is common to many mental disorders, resulting in actions that, though perhaps rational to the individual, might seem entirely inappropriate or harmful to others. So what is it that causes these actions, and why do they continue? The theory expounded in this book shows how the key to this problem might be compulsion. This book presents a new analysis of the notion of compulsion - developed from action theory. The books starts with an introduction to action theory (for...