Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía

Mental Disorders as Failures of Attention

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Laura K. Soter, Jesse S. Summers — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The DSM–5 characterizes mental disorders as significant disturbances in cognition, emotion, or behavior. But what might unite the disturbances on this list? We hypothesize that mental disorders can all be meaningfully characterized as failures of attention. We understand these as failures to distribute attention in the way one has most reason to, and we include both failures of tendency and of ability. We discuss six examples of mental disorders and offer a preliminary gloss of how to recast each as centrally involving a failure of attention. We close by highlighting theoretical and practical upshots of our proposal.

Valuable Harmful Dysfunctions

Virginia Ballesteros, Ana L. Batalla — Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper addresses the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of mental disorder. We argue that some mental conditions meet both of its criteria —the dysfunction criterion and the harm criterion— and yet should not count as mental disorders because of their value. We contend that the harm criterion, by taking harm as a proxy for disvalue, is an inadequate normative criterion in these cases. Therefore, further ethical considerations should be included as a normative criterion. To illustrate our view, we draw on the experience and reflections of Jean Améry, a philosopher and Holocaust survivor who resisted the diagnosis of KZ-Syndrom.

Patients as Experts, Participatory Sense-Making, and Relational Autonomy

Michelle Maiese — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Although mental health professionals traditionally have been viewed as sole experts and decision-makers, there is increasing awareness that the experiential knowledge of former patients can make an important contribution to mental health practices. I argue that current patients likewise possess a kind of expertise, and that including them as active participants in diagnosis and treatment can strengthen their autonomy and allow them to build up important habits and skills. To make sense of these agential benefits and describe how patients might act as co-regulators of a therapeutic encounter, I look to the enactivist notion of “participatory sensemaking”.

The Looping Effects of Medicalizing Grief

Alice Elizabeth Kelley — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The most recent versions of official psychiatric diagnostic guidelines include a new addition: Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). PGD is controversial due to concerns about harmful looping effects. Some opponents of PGD’s inclusion in the DSM worry that the diagnosis may pathologize normal human experiences and alienate grievers from their grief. This paper argues that these concerns are less troubling than they initially appear (in part because they assume an unhelpful, and conceptually optional, background understanding of health conditions as pathologies) and calls attention to overlooked beneficial looping effects that might be achieved by medicalizing (some) experiences of grief.

The Science and Moral Psychology of Addiction: A Case Study in Integrative Philosophy of Psychiatry

Quinn Hiroshi Gibson — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Though addiction is a complex empirical phenomenon, some of the most pressing questions about it concern how we should evaluate agents who are living with it. To that end, a fruitful methodology is to tease out from our best sciences consequences at the level of moral psychology. Taking account of epidemiology, behavioral science, animal studies and, chiefly, neuroscience, I argue for a view according to which addiction involves dysfunctional motivational states (which I call “hybrid intentions”) as well as cognitive distortions. This argument can be made without needing to settle the traditional debate about whether addiction is a disease.

Los límites del yo: hacia una clarificación de la relación entre delirios de inserción de pensamiento y el principio de inmunidad al error a través de la mala identificación

Pablo López-Silva, Emmanuel Méndez — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the debate about whether delusions of thought insertion constitute a counterexample against the so-called principle of immunity to error through misidentification. After distinguishing different formulations of the principle in the literature, we claim that the aforementioned delusional phenomena does not undermine the target principle. Finally, we clarify the concept of psychological self-adscription in its use relative to first-person pronouns in the context of the debate about the relationship between thought insertion and immunity to error through misidentification.

Current Themes in the Philosophy of Psychiatry

Federico Burdman — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Current Themes in the Philosophy of Psychiatry