Category Archives: Philosophy

Report on the Philosophy of Psychiatry Work in Progress Day, Lancaster University, 2nd of June 2017

Causation, Classification, Methodology, Philosophy

The 2nd of June saw the annual Philosophy of Psychiatry Work in Progress Day. This has been going on for longer than I have been at Lancaster and is the fifth one I have presented at. There was good attendance and it went smoothly, an enjoyable day of seeing papers from multiple perspectives in the philosophy of psychiatry. I shall give a summery of the talks below.

Rachel Cooper (Lancaster) presented on “Intentional actions, symptom checklists, and problems with cross-cultural validity”. She discussed standardised tests for personality disorders and how they included intentional actions. She then discussed how intentional actions are often given different interpretations in different cultures, creating problems for such standardised personality tests.

Marcin Moskalewicz (Oxford) presented on “Ipseity, self-consciousness, and the problem of time in schizophrenia”. He outlined ways in which time is perceived and explained how altered self-consciousness in schizophrenia can lead to an altered sense of time.

Moujan Mirdamadi (Lancaster) presented on “Death-consciousness and Depression in Iran”. She discussed the Iranian focus upon death and described how she felt this influenced some of the descriptions she received from her qualitative study of depressed Iranian patients.

Ian Hare (UEA) presented on “Qualitative Methods: a Philosophical Toolkit for Cognitive Psychiatry”. He outlined how qualitative studies can be used to gain greater descriptive understanding of a diagnosis and this can be used to provide a firmer basis for constructing psychological and psychiatric theories.

Rachel Gunn (Birmingham) presented on “The Delusional Experience as a Breakdown in Affective Framing”. She described how experience of delusions was not just purely mental but also involved many physiological and experiential changes. She then suggested that this means non-cognitive therapy approaches could be of value.

Dan Degerman (Lancaster) presented on “If you’re not psychiatry, you’re antipsychiatry – Exploring how American psychiatrists perceive their critics”. He outlined how psychiatrists perceived anti-psychiatrists and how they often labeled critics with many divergent views as anti-psychiatrist. He then suggested this can unfairly devalue psychiatric patients, who often have valuable concerns over psychiatry, thereby reducing their political agency.

Anneli Jefferson (Birmingham) presented on “Mental disorders and brain disorders – an obsolete distinction?”. She looked popular and influential arguments against seeing mental disorders and brain disorders which employ a hardware-software analogy. She criticised this argument on causal grounds then looked at counter arguments to her claims.

Joel Kruger (Exeter) presented on “Unworlding and Affective Externalism in Schizophrenia”. He discussed notions of the external mind, how perception and cognition can involve parts of the external world, and used it to understand notions of breakdown of affective scaffolding in schizophrenia and the sense of unworlding it leads to.

Victoria Allison-Bolger presented on ” ‘A thing like the ocean’ – using metaphor in understanding psychoses”. She discussed how many psychiatric diagnosis did not fit typical notions of a good classifications and suggested this means we should modify notions of good classifications to fit the diagnosis rather than make diagnosis fit our preconceptions about what is a good classification.

Gloria Ayob (UCLan) presented on “Personal autonomy and serious psychopathology”. She discussed the difficulties and possibilities of attaining a value neutral notion of serious psychosis. She tried to see if the Liberal notion that everyone should be free to believe what they wish providing it does not harm anyone could fit the notion that some people have deluded views of the world.

Finally, I presented on “Causal Structures vs Causal Mechanisms: Implications for RDoC”. I will outline these ideas in the future.

Overall, an enjoyable day with a lot of paper presented on interesting and diverse areas. The workshop typically runs every year, usually in May, June or July, and it would be worth looking for the announcement of the 2018 workshop next year.

Reviewing Psychiatry Disrupted

Classification, Medication, Philosophy

Psychiatry Disrupted was released in 2014, making it a relatively new book on the topic of anti-psychiatry. The editor’s introduction argues that anti-psychiatrists often do not focus enough on what an alternative to psychiatry would look like and this book is intended to fill this gap. Since most the well known classic anti-psychiatry texts are rather old and since they usually criticise psychiatry without sufficiently outlining an alternative I was interested in this book. Whilst I am far from being an anti-psychiatrist myself, I wanted to see what a modern alternative to psychiatry would look like. Unfortunately, I think this book fell quite far short of this objective.

Firstly, many articles often criticise psychiatry without actually explaining why psychiatry might be wrong. This does not occur on every issue but sometimes it is stated as a given that psychiatry is in error. For example, some authors simply criticise psychiatric classifications without explaining why they might be flawed. This is problematic because the problems with classifications are complicated. Generally, most psychiatric classifications are trade-offs, a committee having choices over how to formulate them and generally any advantages to a way of classifying will also involve disadvantages. For example, lumping vs splitting, or not otherwise specified being vague but allows more coverage, or having narrow but specific diagnosis vs broader ones which over-lap with each other. Now, it could be argued that psychiatrists are choosing a bad combination of advantages and disadvantages, or that any possible combination of advantages are always outweighed by disadvantages. I don’t think that myself but at least making that argument would be better than an outright dismissal without argument. This occurs too many times in the book.

Secondly, there was relatively little on what an alternative to psychiatry would look like. There is quite a lot of detail about how different groups with diverse interests could get together to oppose psychiatry. In a sense this moves the anti-psychiatry movement forward, in that we know anti-psychiatry objects to psychiatry and this book shows new ways to go about objecting. But I’m still uncertain what should replace psychiatry. I got the impression that an alternative would involve more psychotherapy, less drugs, more user involvement and more user choice. In principle, I could agree with all that, but doing this would not require an end to psychiatry. This would still leave room for psychiatrists to classify and proscribe drugs, just that psychiatrists would more often refer people for psychotherapy and involve the user more. So this is hardly a massive overhaul of psychiatry. If the anti-psychiatry movement has something more radical in mind then I want to see it explicitly outlined, a detailed alternative of what would replace psychiatry.

The book did have some good points. It went into quite a lot of detail about how various different interests groups might conflict and gave some reasoned arguments about how to resolve these conflicts or who should get priority. It also had some innovative ideas about how different groups could work together. Additionally, it did highlight, often with practical examples, various ways in which psychiatric patients can be oppressed, devalued or misinterpreted, primarily due to false assumptions on the part of psychiatrists and care workers. Some of these issues were subtle and worth reading about.

Science and its use for philosophers

Methodology, Philosophy, Science

Really nice quote about the relationship between philosophy of science and philosophy more generally: “As long as there was no such subject as ‘philosophy of science’, all students of philosophy felt obligated to keep at least one eye part of the time on both the methodological and the substantive aspects of the scientific enterprise. And if the result was often a confusion of the task of philosophy with the task of science, and almost equally often a projection of the framework of the latest scientific speculations into the common sense picture of the world … at least it had the merit of ensuring that reflection on the nature and implications of scientific discourse was an integral and vital part of philosophical thinking generally. But now that philosophy of science has nominal as well as real existence, there has arisen the temptation to leave it to the specialists, and to confuse the sound idea that philosophy is not science with the mistaken idea that philosophy is independent of science” Wilfrid Sellars (quoted in an article from the book What is Philosophy?, C. P. Ragland, Sarah L. Heidt (editors)).

Much has changed since 1956 when Sellars wrote this but it raises an important issue. I’ve long believed we need closer merge science and philosophy, and whilst many philosophers do not integrate science in their work, plenty do. This is positive. However, I’m often concerned that when philosophers do use science to further their arguments, they often take scientific evidence too concretely, as something which either logically supports their argument or does not. Generally, however, scientific theories are models that describes idealised probabilities. They do not easily function as premises which entail logically valid arguments or function as clear counterarguments. Rather, they function more analogously to risk factors, scientific claims being individual sources of evidence which push an argument in one direction or another. Sellars claims general philosophers paid more attention to the methodology of science. I wonder if this is lacking today. Whilst it is great that philosophers not infrequently turn to science to support their arguments, those philosophers should realise how tentative, how heavily inferential and how probabilistic many scientific claims are. When philosophical claims rest upon such scientific claims then the strength of those philosophical claims is reduced. I think this is generally the case and philosophy would be better to recognise this. Just like scientists, philosophers employing science need both knowledge of science and knowledge of methodology of science.

Book Review of Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation: DSM, ICD, RDoC, and Beyond

Philosophy, Validity,

The December issue of History of Psychiatry contains my book review of Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation: DSM, ICD, RDoC, and Beyond (edited by Peter Zachar, Drozdstoj St. Stoyanov, Massimiliano Aragona and Assen Jablensky).

Though the book review appears in History of Psychiatry, the book is primarily philosophical (plus a few history chapters). Some papers discuss what notions of validation can be legitimately applied to, some discuss under what conditions validation succeeds and others discuss exactly what validating something accomplishes. For its interesting and diverse discussion of validation it is recommended for both philosophers and psychiatrists.

Making psychology more textual but still statistical

Philosophy, Psychology,

I just read a couple of textbooks on anxiety. I was looking to see if anxiety was ever described as manifesting in a particular way and I found both textbooks to be largely unhelpful. They were severely lacking in qualitative descriptions of patients, very little on the experience of anxiety. Instead it is mainly statistical, describing statistical correlations between anxiety and gender, age, upbringing, other psychological traits etc.

I was particularly concerned by how anxiety was demarcated from other psychological states (depression, worry, fear etc) and different types of anxiety were demarcated (social, agoraphobia, phobia, PTSD, etc) without employing much qualitative descriptions by patients. Without such information are we really sure the boundaries between, say, anxiety and depression have been adequately drawn, similarly so with boundaries between different types of anxiety. Psychologists certainly have criteria, checklists and questionnaires to make such distinctions on but how much trust should we put in them? To be fair, both textbooks were aware of this problem but unfortunately seemingly suggested more studies using those same criteria would solve the problem, rather than trying think about and improve the criteria.

If we want to get clear about something then you might consider asking a philosopher to think about it, to analysis the concepts, to look for assumptions. All well and good. However, I also think this approach is severely limited, since philosophers have a tendency of making distinctions on obscure grounds little connected to everyday experience. Also, it is difficult to put diverse human experience like anxiety into necessary and sufficient without risking turning the concept of anxiety into some abstract notion far removed from human experience. In my experience, sometimes conceptual analysis of psychological states results in something largely unrecognisable. The psychologists ‘anxiety’ I can relate to, this will not always be the case with the philosopher’s ‘anxiety’.

There may be a middle ground. Conceptual analysis is important but can only go so far, at some point concepts should be opperationalised and need applying to the world. Philosphers should ideally give their concepts formalised criteria and then do statistical studies on them. Statistics hopefully should show the concept has some ‘fit’ with the world and the concepts can be modified in light of those statistics to get the fit better, to make it more relevant to patient reports. Unlike the psychologists though, make the opperationalised criteria rich and textual, highlight them with patient case studies, analyse those case studies conceptually to draw boundaries between concepts and draw inter-relations between concepts. More importantly, recognise these are only concepts and recognise that concepts rarely (perhaps never) fully mesh with the world, so employ many different concepts, formulate many different opperationalised criteria for statistical studies rather than continually employing the same old criteria. A psychology which willing drew different boundaries between anxiety and depression in different studies would have greater difficulty comparing results of different experiments but those results themselves would likely be so much more richer empirically, the statistics would reveal so much more.

I’m not sure how closely they can be merged or how exactly how it would be best done (major institutional changes would be ideal!) but the qualitative and the statistical can be brought closer together and this may require both psychologists and philosophers learning from one another.