Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, who presents his recent book,  A Manifesto for Mental Health   (Palgrave 2019). Nobody really believes that our mental health system is fit for purpose, but too many people persist in reinforcing that failed system. It is no longer good enough to call for better funding; we need genuinely radical change. My new book presents a new and distinctive perspective. One that challenges traditional approaches and vested interests of professionals, but one with surprisingly well-placed support . I argue that we need to change our ideas about what mental health actually is. Before setting out practically how our mental health system should change, A Manifesto for Mental Health critically examines the dominant ‘disease-model’ of mental health care. Using research into both biological neuroscience and the social determinants of psychological problems, the book offers ...

This post is by Jennifer Radden , Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston . Here, she discusses some of the ideas in and related to her paper “ Rethinking Disease in Psychiatry: Disease Models and the Medical Imaginary ” recently published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. My philosophical research on the understanding, care and implications of mental disorder reflects an abiding interest in medical history. (Recent monographs with this focus include The Nature of Melancholy (2000), On Delusion (2011), and Melancholic Habits: Burton’s Anatomy for the Mind Sciences (2017).) The era during which asylum-keepers were gradually being replaced by newly professional and medically scientific alienists, using observations from the asylum to consolidate ideas about a class of distinctly mental diseases, offer us intriguing hints about how to understand mental disorder today.  Salient for my paper about the medical imagin...

Şerife Tekin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio . Her research program in philosophy of science and mind aims to enhance psychiatric epistemology by developing methods for supplementing the existing scientific literature with a philosophical study of the first-person accounts of those with mental illness.  She draws on the scientific literature on mental illness, philosophical literature on the self, and the ethics literature on what contributes to human flourishing to facilitate the expansion of psychiatric knowledge that will ultimately yield to effective treatments of mental illness. Here she discusses her article, “Brain Mechanisms and the Disease Model of Addiction: Is it the Whole Story of the Addicted Self? A Philosophical-Skeptical Perspective,” which recently appeared in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction . In my chapter in this anthology, which brings together cutting-edge work on the sc...

In today's post, Peter Kinderman introduces his new book ‘ A Prescription for Psychiatry: Why We Need a Whole New Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing ’, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan. I am professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and President-Elect of the British Psychological Society . My research interests are in psychological processes underpinning wellbeing and mental health. I have published widely on the role of psychological factors as mediators between biological, social and circumstantial factors in mental health and wellbeing. I have been awarded (with colleagues) a total of over £6 million in research grant funding (from the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the NHS Forensic Mental Health Research and Development Programme, the European Commission and others). My most recent grant, awarded in 2015, was for a total of over £1m from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESR...