Premium
Mental disorders are not brain disorders
Author(s) -
Banner Natalie F.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of evaluation in clinical practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.737
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1365-2753
pISSN - 1356-1294
DOI - 10.1111/jep.12048
Subject(s) - physicalism , realm , biomedicine , psychology , embodied cognition , mental illness , classification of mental disorders , association (psychology) , mental health , psychiatry , psychotherapist , epistemology , prevalence of mental disorders , philosophy , metaphysics , biology , political science , law , genetics
As advances in neuroscience and genetics reveal complex associations between brain structures, functions and symptoms of mental disorders, there have been calls for psychiatric classifications to be reconfigured, to conceptualize mental disorders as disorders of the brain. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken, and that the level at which we identify mental disorders is, and should be, the person , not the brain. This is not to deny physicalism or argue that the mental realm is somehow distinct from the physical, but rather to suggest the things that are going ‘wrong’ in mental disorder are picked out at the person‐level: they are characterized by breaches in epistemic, rational, evaluative, emotional, social and moral norms. However, as our scientific understanding of the brain becomes advanced, what makes an identified neurobiological difference in brain structure or functioning indicative of pathology is its association with these behaviours at the person‐level. Instead of collapsing psychiatry into biomedicine, biomedicine may benefit from drawing closer to the expertise of psychiatry, as it is able to accommodate social, psychological and biological explanations while focusing on the person, within their environment.