Mental Health and Psychiatry

Philosophy of psychiatry examines the conceptual foundations of how mental illness is defined, diagnosed, and understood, questioning whether frameworks like the DSM capture genuine natural categories or reflect contingent social and medical conventions. A central concern is phenomenology—the careful description of first-person experience—which researchers apply to conditions like schizophrenia spectrum disorders to understand how disruptions in self-experience, embodiment, and the sense of time constitute the disorder from the inside, not just as observable symptoms. This work challenges reductive neuroscientific accounts by arguing that subjective experience and its breakdowns cannot be fully translated into brain states without losing something essential. Open questions include how to define health in a way that is neither purely biostatistical nor culturally relative, and how phenomenological findings can be integrated with neuroscience to produce a more complete account of psychiatric conditions.

Works

123,367

Total citations

1,037,515

Keywords

PhenomenologyPsychiatric DisordersDSMSelf-ExperienceHealth DefinitionSchizophrenia Spectrum