Mental realitiesa??the concept of mental disorder and the mind-body problem

摘要

From a philosophical point of view, the subject of Thomas Schramme's article seems to be well-known as he addresses one of the most prominent debates in both classical and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. Of course, Schramme does not attempt to broadly cover this general issue. He rather focuses on the neglect of philosophical approaches within the context of the search for a sound definition of mental disorders that led to conceptual as well as theoretical problems for psychology and psychiatry. As a result of this neglect, Schramme argues, psychiatry is facing a make-believe dilemma that implies either Cartesian dualism or reductionism/eliminativism when trying to save the notion of “mental disorder.” In a nutshell, this apparent dilemma for current psychiatry goes as follows: Either we try to save the notion of mental disorder by claiming an independent sphere of the mental and end up with the implausibility of substance dualism. Or we attempt to avoid this problem by means of consistent somatization and a naturalistic reduction of mental terms and phenomena, thereby in fact disposing of any substantial meaning of mental disorder. Hence, psychiatry seems to be stuck “between the Scylla of reduction and the Charybdis of dualism” (Schramme, 2013, p. 2).