Mental Health and Psychiatry

Philosophy of psychiatry examines the conceptual foundations underlying how mental illness is defined, diagnosed, and experienced, questioning whether frameworks like the DSM capture what is genuinely happening in conditions such as schizophrenia or whether they impose categories that obscure more than they reveal. Drawing on phenomenology—the philosophical study of conscious experience—researchers investigate how disorders like schizophrenia spectrum conditions alter the most basic structures of selfhood, embodiment, and temporal awareness, dimensions that standard diagnostic criteria often leave unaddressed. A central tension runs through the field between neuroscientific accounts that locate mental illness in brain mechanisms and phenomenological accounts that insist first-person experience cannot be reduced to biology alone. Open questions include how to construct a defensible definition of health that is neither purely statistical nor culturally relative, and how clinical practice might be reshaped if anomalous self-experience, rather than behavioral symptoms, were treated as the primary diagnostic signal.

Works

123,984

Total citations

1,042,164

Keywords

PhenomenologyPsychiatric DisordersDSMSelf-ExperienceHealth DefinitionSchizophrenia Spectrum