Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry

Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry PDF Author: Jeffrey Poland
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262551918
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book

Book Description
Leading scholars offer perspectives from the philosophy of science on the crisis in psychiatric research that exploded after the publication of DSM-5. Psychiatry and mental health research is in crisis, with tensions between psychiatry's clinical and research aims and controversies over diagnosis, treatment, and scientific constructs for studying mental disorders. At the center of these controversies is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which—especially after the publication of DSM-5—many have found seriously flawed as a guide for research. This book addresses the crisis and the associated “extraordinary science” (Thomas Kuhn's term for scientific research during a state of crisis) from the perspective of philosophy of science. The goal is to help reconcile the competing claims of science and phenomenology within psychiatry and to offer new insights for the philosophy of science. The contributors discuss the epistemological origins of the current crisis, the nature of evidence in psychiatric research, and the National Institute for Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria project. They consider particular research practices in psychiatry—computational, personalized, mechanistic, and user-led—and the specific categories of schizophrenia, depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. Finally, they examine the DSM's dubious practice of pathologizing normality. Contributors Richard P. Bentall, John Bickle, Robyn Bluhm, Rachel Cooper, Kelso Cratsley, Owen Flanagan, Michael Frank, George Graham, Ginger A. Hoffman, Harold Kincaid, Aaron Kostko, Edouard Machery, Jeffrey Poland, Claire Pouncey, Şerife Tekin, Peter Zachar

Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry

Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry PDF Author: Jeffrey Poland
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262551918
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book

Book Description
Leading scholars offer perspectives from the philosophy of science on the crisis in psychiatric research that exploded after the publication of DSM-5. Psychiatry and mental health research is in crisis, with tensions between psychiatry's clinical and research aims and controversies over diagnosis, treatment, and scientific constructs for studying mental disorders. At the center of these controversies is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which—especially after the publication of DSM-5—many have found seriously flawed as a guide for research. This book addresses the crisis and the associated “extraordinary science” (Thomas Kuhn's term for scientific research during a state of crisis) from the perspective of philosophy of science. The goal is to help reconcile the competing claims of science and phenomenology within psychiatry and to offer new insights for the philosophy of science. The contributors discuss the epistemological origins of the current crisis, the nature of evidence in psychiatric research, and the National Institute for Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria project. They consider particular research practices in psychiatry—computational, personalized, mechanistic, and user-led—and the specific categories of schizophrenia, depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder. Finally, they examine the DSM's dubious practice of pathologizing normality. Contributors Richard P. Bentall, John Bickle, Robyn Bluhm, Rachel Cooper, Kelso Cratsley, Owen Flanagan, Michael Frank, George Graham, Ginger A. Hoffman, Harold Kincaid, Aaron Kostko, Edouard Machery, Jeffrey Poland, Claire Pouncey, Şerife Tekin, Peter Zachar

Philosophical Psychopathology

Philosophical Psychopathology PDF Author: George Graham
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262071592
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book

Book Description
A benchmark volume for an emerging field where mental disorders serve as the springboard for philosophical insights.

Science and Psychiatry

Science and Psychiatry PDF Author: Solomon H. Snyder
Publisher: American Psychiatric Pub
ISBN: 1585628824
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Get Book

Book Description
Solomon Snyder has been instrumental in the establishment of modern psychopharmacology -- as a pioneer in the identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs and in the explanation of the actions of psychotropic agents. Science and Psychiatry is a collection of some of his best scientific papers, publications ranging over forty years that represent important advances in psychopharmacology and molecular biology. Audacious and unanticipated when they first appeared, these papers opened up new areas of understanding and revolutionized the modern study of the brain. Republished here, they show why fundamental research into the "messengers of the mind" is as essential for clinicians as for researchers. Many of these papers have clear clinical relevance, offering insight into modern neuroscience to help make sense of the bewildering array of available psychotropic medications and point the way toward more effective and safer agents. Others describe the underpinnings of psychopharmacology that practitioners need to know, especially regarding the role of receptors in drug action. Each of the nine groups of research articles is accompanied by a commentary by a well-known authority, putting the discoveries in perspective and providing a broad overview of subjects ranging from characterization of the enkephalins to serotonin receptor subtypes. The final set of papers focuses on apoptosis, the general process of cell suicide, where Snyder's work with bilirubin holds promise for treating neurodegenerative disorders. And in a closing piece, "The Audacity Principle in Science," Snyder speculates about factors conducive to creativity and efficacy in scientific discovery. The articles particularly describe four groups of extraordinary discoveries for which Snyder is widely recognized: Identification of opiate receptors, providing keys to understanding pain perception Characterization of the IP3 receptor, exploring its role as a target for lithium treatment in manic-depressive disorders Establishment of nitric oxide as a transmitter in the brain, radically transforming conceptualizations of neurotransmission Discovery that D-serine is the normal stimulus for the glycine site of the NMDA receptor, providing new insight into the regulation of the receptor important for learning and memory Hailed as one of the preeminent scientists of the past twenty years, Snyder is a consummate researcher who confesses to remaining obsessed with the need to "think thoughts no one else has thought before." Science and Psychiatry clearly shows how that urge accounts for the diversity of challenges he has taken on as it conveys the origins of modern psychopharmacologic practice.

Mad Science

Mad Science PDF Author: Stuart A. Kirk
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412849764
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book

Book Description
When it comes to understanding and treating madness, distortions of research are not rare, misinterpretation of data is not isolated, and bogus claims of success are not voiced by isolated researchers seeking aggrandizement. This book's detailed analyses of coercion and community treatment, diagnosis, and psychopharmacology reveals that these characteristics of bad science are endemic, institutional, and protected in psychiatry. This is mad science. Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are not based on convincing research, but on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment in the community, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that now controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome. This book provides an engaging and readable scientific and social critique of current mental health practices. The authors are scholars, researchers, and clinicians who have written extensively about community care, diagnosis, and psychoactive drugs. Mad Science is a must read for all specialists in the field as well as for the informed public.

Defining Mental Disorder

Defining Mental Disorder PDF Author: Luc Faucher
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045648
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Psychiatry in the Scientific Image

Psychiatry in the Scientific Image PDF Author: Dominic Murphy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262517442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Get Book

Book Description
An analysis of the understanding, classification, and explanation of mental disorders that proposes that psychiatry adopt the best practices of the cognitive sciences. In Psychiatry in the Scientific Image, Dominic Murphy looks at psychiatry from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy of science, considering three issues: how we should conceive of, classify, and explain mental illness. If someone is said to have a mental illness, what about it is mental? What makes it an illness? How might we explain and classify it? A system of psychiatric classification settles these questions by distinguishing the mental illnesses and showing how they stand in relation to one another. This book explores the philosophical issues raised by the project of explaining and classifying mental illness. Murphy argues that the current literature on mental illness—exemplified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is an impediment to research; it lacks a coherent concept of the mental and a satisfactory account of disorder, and yields too much authority to commonsense thought about the mind. He argues that the explanation of mental illness should meet the standards of good explanatory practice in the cognitive neurosciences, and that the classification of mental disorders should group symptoms into conditions based on the causal structure of the normal mind.

Extraordinary Conditions

Extraordinary Conditions PDF Author: Janis H. Jenkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 0520287118
Category : Cultural psychiatry
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book

Book Description
"With fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, eloquently showing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning. Her studies illustrate the shaping of human reality and subjectivity in light of extreme psychological suffering, and shed light on psycho-political processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as non-human or less than fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to empathically engage the experience of persons living with conditions that are culturally defined as mental illness. Jenkins compellingly shows that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture matters vitally in all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Analysis at this edge of experience refashions the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, routine and extreme, healthy and pathological. The book argues that the study of mental illness is indispensable to anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. While anthropology neglects the extraordinary to its theoretical and empirical peril, psychiatry neglects culture to its theoretical and clinical peril"--Provided by publisher.

Alternative perspectives on psychiatric validation

Alternative perspectives on psychiatric validation PDF Author: Peter Zachar
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191502049
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
Many of the current debates about validity in psychiatry and psychology are predicated on the unexpected failure to validate commonly used diagnostic categories. The recognition of this failure has resulted in, what Thomas Kuhn calls, a period of extraordinary science in which validation problems are given increased weight, alternatives are proposed, methodologies are debated, and philosophical and historical analyses are seen as more relevant than usual. In this important new book in the IPPP series, a group of leading thinkers in psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy offer alternative perspectives that address both the scientific and clinical aspects of psychiatric validation, emphasizing throughout their philosophical and historical considerations. This is a book that all psychiatrists, as well as philosophers with an interest in psychiatry, will find thought provoking and valuable.

Classifying Psychopathology

Classifying Psychopathology PDF Author: Harold Kincaid
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026254959X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book

Book Description
Scholars question the extent to which current psychiatric classification systems are inadequate for diagnosis, treatment, and research of mental disorders and offer suggestions for improvement. In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as “oppositional defiance disorder” and pathological gambling. Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar

The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry

The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry PDF Author: Serife Tekin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350024074
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the central questions and themes lying at the heart of a vibrant area of philosophical inquiry. Aligning core issues in psychiatry with traditional philosophical areas, it presents a focused overview of the historical and contemporary problems dominating the philosophy of psychiatry. Beginning with an introduction to philosophy of psychiatry, the book addresses what psychiatry is and distinguishes it from other areas of medical practice, other health care professions and psychology. With each section of the companion corresponding to a philosophical subject, contributors systematically cover relevant topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, ethics, social and political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, and philosophy of medicine. Looking ahead to new research directions, chapters address recent issues including the metaphysics of mental disorders, gender and race in psychiatry and psychiatric ethics. Featuring discussion questions, suggestions for further reading and an annotated bibliography, The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry is an accessible survey of the debates and developments in the field suitable for undergraduates in philosophy and professional philosophers new to philosophy of psychiatry.