Foreword

doi:10.1093/med/9780198786863.002.0007

Front Matter

Foreword

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https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198786863.002.0007

Pages

ix–xii

Published:

February 2019

Extract

Honored with the task of introducing this exemplary volume—an important book, at a critical time—I want to begin by placing Mohammed Rashed’s project within its historical and disciplinary context, before drawing attention to some of its most notable, and admirable, qualities.

Mental health and ill health intersect with a host of traditional philosophical concerns—reductionism, agency, responsibility, knowledge, belief, rationality, and self-identity, to name a few—and since the last quarter of the twentieth century, philosophical attention has been drawn to the ways mental disorder confounds, and illuminates, these and allied concepts. By the 1980s and 1990s, philosophy and mental health, or as it was more often known in the United States, the philosophy of psychiatry, emerged as a distinguishable research area within academic philosophy, affording focused conferences and associations, specialized monographs and collections in scholarly presses, and a widely respected scholarly journal.

From the start, the new research field was eclectic, notably broad in its interests and methods, and contentious. Unlike many medical conditions, mental disorders are rarely (or arguably, never) a-symptomatic. Nor, thus far, can they be verified independently of first person symptom-descriptions. And this distinctive epistemic feature has fostered involvement with phenomenological ideas inherited from thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty. Within psychology during these decades, in addition, a functionalist cognitivism and neuroscience, agreeable to philosophical language and presuppositions, came to replace behaviorism. Beyond these very general trends, the subareas of philosophy registered particular challenges posed by psychopathology. Philosophers of science have refined their conceptions of kinds through a consideration of mental diseases, for example. The treatment and care of the mentally ill have attracted the attention of bioethics. Those analyzing agency recognized the puzzles raised by addiction. And traditional analyses were required to acknowledge the anomalous epistemology of delusions. Disagreement here has always been wide, and deep. Undertaken alongside an increasingly biological and reductionist medical psychiatry and neuroscience, much of this work accepts, or makes peace with, the diagnostic categories and methodological presuppositions of models employed by medicine, where those with mental disorder are construed as blameless victims of misfortune, indistinguishable from people disabled by other forms of ill health, and as dependent on their medicines as the diabetic on her insulin. Irreconcilably contrary, meanwhile, were the antipsychiatry claims of Szasz, Laing, Foucault, and the feminists. Mental illness was not an illness at all; medical psychiatry was an organized, predatory force, to be resisted.

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