The person and philosophy of science and medicine

This article addresses three perspectives from which to view the person in personalized and person-centered medicine and psychiatry. The first considers the particular person’s body, with a focus on pharmacogenomic advances in understanding individual variation both in drug metabolism (e.g. CYP genotyping) as well as in dopamine and receptor polymorphisms. The second part of the talk considers the particular person’s ‘mind’—as a complex narrative of life plans, experiences, responses, and family and social contexts, and how philosophy has characterized and interpreted the person seeking psychiatric help. The article concludes with an exploration of how the first two perspectives can best be philosophically integrated for the whole particularized individual, and considers how the tools and resources of the World Psychiatric Association Institutional Program on Psychiatry for the Person (IPPP) might assist this integration.