The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness

by S. Nassir Ghaemi MD MPH, Paul R. McHugh MD (Foreword by)

Overview

Because most psychiatric illnesses are complex phenomena, no single method or approach is sufficient to explain them or the experiences of persons who suffer from them. In The Concepts of Psychiatry S. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D. argues that the discipline of psychiatry can therefore be understood best from a pluralistic perspective. Grounding his approach in the works of Paul McHugh, Phillip Slavney, Leston Havens, and others, Ghaemi incorporates a more explicitly philosophical discussion of the strengths of a pluralistic model and the weaknesses of other approaches, such as biological or psychoanalytic theories, the biopsychosocial model, or eclecticism.

Ghaemi's methodology is twofold: on the one hand, he applies philosophical ideas, such as utilitarian versus duty-based ethical models, to psychiatric practice. On the other hand, he subjects clinical psychiatric phenomena, such as psychosis or the Kraepelin nosology, to a conceptual analysis that is philosophically informed. This book will be of interest to professionals and students in psychiatry, as well as psychologists, social workers, philosophers, and general readers who are interested in understanding the field of psychiatry and its practices at a conceptual level.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801881374
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

S. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D., M.P.H., is director of the Bipolar Disorder Research Program at Emory University School of Medicine.

S. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D., M.P.H., is a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and director of the Mood Disorders Program at the Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He also serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He has written several books including Mood Disorders: A Practical Guide; A Clinician's Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health: Measuring Truth and Uncertainty; A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness; and The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness, the last also published by Johns Hopkins.
Paul R. McHugh, M.D., is the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, the former director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the coauthor of The Perspectives of Psychiatry, also available from Johns Hopkins. He was selected by President George W. Bush to sit on the Presidential Council on Bioethics and by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to be on their National Review Board for the elimination of the sexual abuse of children by clergy.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
Part I: Theory: What Clinicians Think and Why
1. The Status Quo: Dogmatism, the Biopsychosocial Model, and Alternatives
2. What There Is: Of Mind and Brain
3. How We Know: Understanding the Mind
4. What Is Scientific Method?
5. Reading Karl Jaspers's General Psychopathology
6. What Is Scientific Method in Psychiatry?
7. Darwin's Dangerous Method: The Essentialist Fallacy
8. What We Value: The Ethics of Psychiatry
9. Desire and Self: Hellenistic and Eastern Approaches
Part III: Practice: What Clinicians Do and Why
10. On the Nature of Mental Illness: Disease or Myth?
11. Order out of Chaos? The Evolution of Psychiatric Nosology
12. A Theory of DSM-IV: Ideal Types
13. Dimensions versus Categories
14. The Perils of Belief: Psychosis
15. The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune: Depression
16. Life's Roller Coaster: Mania
17. Being Self-Aware: Insight
18. Psychopharmacology: Calvinism or Hedonism?
19. Truth and Statistics: Problems of Empirical Psychiatry
20. A Climate of Opinion: What Remains of Psychoanalysis
21. Being There: Existential Psychotherapy
22. Beyond Eclecticism: Integrating Psychotherapy and Psychopharmacology
Part III: After Eclecticism
23. Bridging the Biology-Psychology Dichotomy: The Hopes of Integrationism
24. Why It Is Hard to Be Pluralist
Afterword
Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

from the foreword by Paul R. McHugh M.D.

Eventually we all can hope that psychiatry will join medicine in identifying how the disorders we recognize are not entities imposed from without on people but rather expressions of life under altered circumstances that we can work to correct. To achieve this goal, we need to grasp how we are both working with patients and thinking about their conditions. Read here and see the future—not darkly and indistinctly hoping for inspiration, but face to face with the methods and practices that will bring it to pass.

From the Publisher

Eventually we all can hope that psychiatry will join medicine in identifying how the disorders we recognize are not entities imposed from without on people but rather expressions of life under altered circumstances that we can work to correct. To achieve this goal, we need to grasp how we are both working with patients and thinking about their conditions. Read here and see the future—not darkly and indistinctly hoping for inspiration, but face to face with the methods and practices that will bring it to pass.
—from the foreword by Paul R. McHugh M.D.

Wide ranging and extraordinarily informed, Dr. Ghaemi gives us an indispensable guide to the difficulties and dilemmas of psychiatric work, plus the roadmap for a pluralistic future. A work of truly unusual intelligence.
—Leston Havens, M.D., Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Hospital

Leston Havens

Wide ranging and extraordinarily informed, Dr. Ghaemi gives us an indispensable guide to the difficulties and dilemmas of psychiatric work, plus the roadmap for a pluralistic future. A work of truly unusual intelligence.

— Leston Havens, M.D., Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Hospital

Editorial Reviews

Ghaemi raises dozens of thought-provoking questions in the midst of his tour through the concepts of psychiatry.
—John Z. Sadler, M.D., Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

This interesting and well-written volume can both enhance the reader's conceptual approach to understanding psychiatry and assist the reader's avoidance of dogmatism on the one hand and conceptual 'glibness' on the other . . . A valuable contribution to our literature and an important extension of McHugh and Slavney's 1998 text, The Perspectives of Psychiatry.
—James W. Lomax, M.D., Journal of Clinical Psychiatry

After the narrow confines of most psychiatric writing, it is refreshing to read an author who can quote knowingly from both Seymour Kety and William James and who can competently discuss topics as diverse as the mind-body problem and the relevance for psychiatry of Epicurus and Sufism. The book is a reminder of the rich banquet of conceptual and philosophical issues that are of relevance to our field but rarely make it into the standard literature.
—Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., Psychological Medicine

A sensational success when it comes to waking us up from our conceptually impoverished stupors . . . Ghaemi has given us a book that is not only painfully unusual by today's standards, but so stubbornly and clearly thought out as well.
—Andrés Martin, M.D., M.P.H., Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

The book is intended for thinking psychiatrists, but thinking patients stand to benefit perhaps even more.
—John McManamy, McMan's Depression and Bipolar Weekly

I highly recommend this book to professionals in the mental health field, although others—such as hospital administrators, educators, and the intelligent layperson—may also find it stimulating and thought provoking.
—Victor A. COlotla, PsycCRITIQUES

Ghaemi's grasp is wide. His book will be as much disturbing as satisfying but will provide the reader a sense of where our field has been and where it may need to go.
—Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry

Rare is the book that escapes descending into polemic on the subject of depression . . . Ghaemi provides a philosophical structure for considering unhappiness, but one designed to bolster the scientific validity of depression. As he makes clear, this is needed.
—Alexander Langford, British Journal of Psychiatry

From the Publisher

This interesting and well-written volume can both enhance the reader's conceptual approach to understanding psychiatry and assist the reader's avoidance of dogmatism on the one hand and conceptual 'glibness' on the other . . . A valuable contribution to our literature and an important extension of McHugh and Slavney's 1998 text, The Perspectives of Psychiatry.

Journal of Clinical Psychiatry - James W. Lomax

I highly recommend this book to professionals in the mental health field, although others—such as hospital administrators, educators, and the intelligent layperson—may also find it stimulating and thought provoking.

PsycCRITIQUES - Victor A. COlotla

Ghaemi raises dozens of thought-provoking questions in the midst of his tour through the concepts of psychiatry.

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease - John Z. Sadler

The book is intended for thinking psychiatrists, but thinking patients stand to benefit perhaps even more.

McMan's Depression and Bipolar Weekly - John McManamy

After the narrow confines of most psychiatric writing, it is refreshing to read an author who can quote knowingly from both Seymour Kety and William James and who can competently discuss topics as diverse as the mind-body problem and the relevance for psychiatry of Epicurus and Sufism. The book is a reminder of the rich banquet of conceptual and philosophical issues that are of relevance to our field but rarely make it into the standard literature.

Psychological Medicine - Kenneth S. Kendler

A sensational success when it comes to waking us up from our conceptually impoverished stupors . . . Ghaemi has given us a book that is not only painfully unusual by today's standards, but so stubbornly and clearly thought out as well.

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry - Andrés Martin

Rare is the book that escapes descending into polemic on the subject of depression . . . Ghaemi provides a philosophical structure for considering unhappiness, but one designed to bolster the scientific validity of depression. As he makes clear, this is needed.

British Journal of Psychiatry - Alexander Langford

"A sensational success when it comes to waking us up from our conceptually impoverished stupors... Ghaemi has given us a book that is not only painfully unusual by today's standards, but so stubbornly and clearly thought out as well."

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry - Andrés Martin

The book is intended for thinking psychiatrists, but thinking patients stand to benefit perhaps even more.

— John McManamy

McMan's Depression and Bipolar Weekly

Ghaemi raises dozens of thought-provoking questions in the midst of his tour through the concepts of psychiatry.

— John Z. Sadler, M.D.

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

After the narrow confines of most psychiatric writing, it is refreshing to read an author who can quote knowingly from both Seymour Kety and William James and who can competently discuss topics as diverse as the mind-body problem and the relevance for psychiatry of Epicurus and Sufism. The book is a reminder of the rich banquet of conceptual and philosophical issues that are of relevance to our field but rarely make it into the standard literature.

— Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D.

Psychological Medicine

A sensational success when it comes to waking us up from our conceptually impoverished stupors... Ghaemi has given us a book that is not only painfully unusual by today's standards, but so stubbornly and clearly thought out as well.

— Andrés Martin, M.D., M.P.H.

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

I highly recommend this book to professionals in the mental health field, although others—such as hospital administrators, educators, and the intelligent layperson—may also find it stimulating and thought provoking.

— Victor A. COlotla

PsycCRITIQUES

This interesting and well-written volume can both enhance the reader's conceptual approach to understanding psychiatry and assist the reader's avoidance of dogmatism on the one hand and conceptual 'glibness' on the other... A valuable contribution to our literature and an important extension of McHugh and Slavney's 1998 text, The Perspectives of Psychiatry.

— James W. Lomax, M.D.

Journal of Clinical Psychiatry

Ghaemi's grasp is wide. His book will be as much disturbing as satisfying but will provide the reader a sense of where our field has been and where it may need to go.

— Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D.

American Journal of Psychiatry