The Disordered Mind

by George Graham

Overview

The Disordered Mind, Third Edition, is a wide-ranging introduction to the philosophy of mental disorder or illness. It examines and explains, from a philosophical standpoint, what mental disorder is: Its reality, causes, consequences, compassionate treatment, and more.

Revised and updated throughout, the third edition includes enhanced discussions of the distinction between mental health and illness, selfhood and delusions about the self, impairments of basic psychological capacities in mental disorder, and the distinct roles that mental causation and neural mechanisms play in mental illness.

The book is organized around four questions:

• What is a mental disorder or illness?

• What makes mental disorder something bad?

• What are various mental disorders and what do they tell us about the mind?

• What is mental health and how may it be restored?

Numerous disorders are discussed, including addiction, agoraphobia, delusion, depression, dissociative identity disorder, obsession-compulsion, schizophrenia, and religious scrupulosity, among others. Several neurological disorders are examined. Various problems associated with DSM-5 and with psychiatric diagnosis are explored. Including chapter summaries and suggestions for further reading, The Disordered Mind is an ideal text for courses in philosophy and should appeal to not just philosophers, but to readers in cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, and related mental health professions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367322328
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Edition description:	3rd ed.
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

George Graham has served as philosophy professor at Alabama-Birmingham and Georgia State and as A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, USA. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and coauthor of Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us about Religions (2020).

Table of Contents

About the third edition x

1 Introduction 1

The problem of mental instability 1

Recent psychiatry 4

Why not a brain disorder? 7

Mental disorder realism 8

Summary 11

Suggested reading 12

2 Conceiving mental disorder 13

Concept of mental disorder has consequences 13

What should a theory of mental disorder do? 14

Referring to mind 19

Exemplars of mental disorder 26

Roles of mentality in a mental disorder 30

Summary 33

Suggested reading 34

3 The disorder of mental disorder 35

What makes a mental disorder undesirable? 35

Drugs, diagnostic labeling, and prescriptive tyranny 38

Are mental disorders diseases or natural kinds? 43

DSM and taking body integrity identity disorder seriously 53

Summary 60

Suggested reading 62

4 Skepticism about mental disorder 63

Mental disorder and the mind/body problem 64

Frogs and toads 66

Mentality and causality 67

Mental disorder diagnosis as disrespect 71

A lesson learned from bodily illness 75

Summary 82

Suggested reading 82

5 Seeking norms for mental disorder 83

Augustine's despair 83

Anxiety, DSM, and assessing norms 85

Cultural conventionalism 91

Mind maladapted 96

Rationality and Intentionality 101

Logic of its own 109

Summary 113

Suggested reading 114

6 Mental health and illness after an original position 115

Reason-responsiveness reconsidered 115

Importance of conscious experience 117

Basic psychological capacities 120

A concept of mental disorder 126

An original position 127

Coming to grief 129

Psychopathy and moral judgment 132

Summary 137

Suggested reading 138

7 Addiction and responsibility for self 139

What is addiction? 139

Impulse, inhibition, and responsibility for self 142

Compulsion and addiction 146

Present and future person 151

Animal models 154

Neural models 156

Why relapse? 159

Summary 163

Suggested reading 164

8 Reality lost and found 165

Symptom and schizophrenia 165

Grand delusions 171

Depressive realism and positive illusions 181

Paranoia, benevolence, and therapeutic compassion 185

Summary 193

Suggested reading 194

9 Minding the missing me 195

Me, myself, and my selves 195

"I am dead" but do not mean it 206

Self-serving in a supermarket 210

The end of the beginning 219

Summary 223

Suggested reading 224

Bibliography 225

Index 241

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Gary B Kaniuk, PsyD (Cermak Health Services)
Description: This is the third edition of a book that explores various philosophical dimensions of mental illness including its existence, etiology, symptoms, treatment, and recovery. The author discusses different DSM-5 psychiatric disorders, along with neurological disorders. The previous edition was published in 2013.
Purpose: It is intended as a "wide-ranging introduction to the philosophy of mental disorder or illness. It examines and explains, from a philosophical standpoint, what mental disorder is: its reality, causes, consequences, compassionate treatment, and more."
Audience: It is described as "an ideal text for courses in philosophy and should appeal to not just philosophers, but to readers in cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry and related mental health professions." The author, formerly on the faculty of Wake Forest University, is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology.
Features: The author posits in the introduction that all people have stable and unstable moments, making everyone vulnerable to mental illness. A behavior becomes a disorder when the thoughts or actions of an individual are involuntary and harmful, thus in need of treatment. He notes the skepticism regarding the existence of mental illness including mind/body dualism and the demeaning of those who have been diagnosed with a disorder. He discusses the question of when symptoms become clinically significant. The book discusses whether addiction is a mental disorder, a brain disorder, or both. In the case of schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, the book addresses the question of how therapists care for these clients if they actively resist help. It ends with a discussion of the metaphysical implications of mental health problems. Though philosophical in nature, the book is very readable.
Assessment: This book challenges the notion of mental disorders, how they are classified, treated, and seen by society and the clients themselves. It helps to identify issues for those who are for, and against, a nonreductive description of mental illness. The book is especially good for undergraduates in psychology, who will consider the existence and treatment of mental disorders.

Doody's Review Service

Praise for previous editions:

"This is a superb contribution to the philosophy of mind and mental illness. … anyone working in philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, neurology, or any of the related mental health professions would find it a fascinating read." - Joseph Martos, The Heythrop Journal

"…an admirably wide-ranging book that provides a rich and stimulating introduction to central topics in the philosophy of mind… The Disordered Mind should be essential reading both for those who are sympathetic and those who are antagonistic to the idea of a non-reductive notion of mental disorder. … Not only is it a welcome addition to the rapidly increasing literature on the philosophy of psychiatry, but it also contributes to establishing its legitimacy as a sub-discipline of philosophy." - Somogy Varga, MIND

"George Graham has a longstanding reputation as a distinguished philosopher of psychiatry, and The Disordered Mind shows why. Its scope is broad and its presentation is clear and precise. It is a very impressive statement of a widespread and important philosophical perspective on mental illness, which everyone studying the philosophy of psychiatry will want to read … It is clear enough, and vividly enough written, to be assigned fruitfully to undergraduates, but it also makes enough contributions to the central debates in the field to be important for specialists." - Dominic Murphy and Gemma Smart, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"George Graham is contemporary philosophy’s most gifted and humane writer. The Disordered Mind is a wise, deep, and thorough inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the various "creaks, cracks, and crevices" into which it is prone sometimes to wander… The Disordered Mind is a pedagogical, philosophical, and psychiatric tour de force." - Owen Flanagan, Duke University, USA

"The book is a success, it is consistently insightful and humane, and conveys a clear understanding not only of relevant philosophical topics, but also of a much more difficult issue, the relevance of those topics to understanding mental illness." - Philip Gerrans, University of Adelaide, Australia

"The Disordered Mind is a must read for anyone who is a psychiatrist, psychologist, philosopher, neurologist, or mental health worker. Indeed, it is a must read for any thoughtful person who simply desires to understand more deeply and more realistically the workings of their own mind as well as the workings of the human mind in general." - Richard Garrett, Bentley University, USA

From the Publisher