Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Changing how mental disorders are studied and managed

As Caio Maximino (2023) says in History of Psychiatry, the "over-reductionist neo-Kraepelinian approach" has been criticised for decades. Like me, he also argues that these criticisms tend to disregard and not make as much as they should of advances in enactivism and phenomenological psychiatry (see eg. previous post). Biomedical psychiatry essentially ignored George Engel’s call for a more integrative approach by continuing with its ontological position that mental phenomena are brain phenomena, even if this is now understood in an eclectic biopsychosocial way (not originally what Engel meant - see eg. previous post). But what's needed is a new epistemology that recognises "the complexity of the relation of biology with interpersonal, social and cultural factors (see another previous post). I have tried to summarise all this in my paper 'Towards a more relational psychiatry: A critical reflection' (see yet another previous post).

No comments: