Understanding Mental Disorders

Daniel Lafleur, MD, CM, FRCPC is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.Christopher Mole, BA (Hons), PhD is a professor of philosophy, and chair of the Cognitive Systems Program, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.Holly Onclin, BA (Hons) is a graduate of the Honours in Philosophy program at the University of British Columbia and a freelance illustrator in Vancouver.

"By interspersing short chapters, equally short endnotes and incisively-curated follow-up readings with a mix of illustrations, the three authors, a psychiatrist, a philosopher, and (for our purposes) a visual artist, have produced a veritable page-turner.... On the whole, this book offers a fair-minded, and measured defense of key tenets of present day medical psychiatry. Extreme positions, including mind-body reductionism, are rejected, and person-centered approaches to care find favor. In their preface the authors note the hoped-for readership of this volume: psychiatrists and other medical practitioners, and also those who encounter psychiatric diagnosis in other ways, such as patients. But we can add a further group. This would be an ideal text to introduce to the philosophy of mental health undergraduate students in philosophy or to graduate students in other disciplines." Jennifer Radden, Metapsychology Online Reviews

• Part I: Mental disorder 1.1 What is mental disorder? 1.2. What makes a mental disorder mental? 1.3. What makes a mental disorder disordered? Part II: Psychiatry and society 2.1. Two ways in which social factors can contribute to mental disorder 2.2 Are we changing people when we should be changing societies? 2.3 Sexuality and disobedience Part III: Dodging nosology 3.1 Psychiatric diagnosis 3.2 Psychiatry without diagnostic categories? 3.3 Categories unlike chemistry's 3.4 Giving the brain no more than its due