Warning: The NCBI web site requires JavaScript to function. more...
Generate a file for use with external citation management software.
Department of Psychiatry, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA. kendler@hsc.vcu.edu
This article, which seeks to sketch a coherent conceptual and philosophical framework for psychiatry, confronts two major questions: how do mind and brain interrelate, and how can we integrate the multiple explanatory perspectives of psychiatric illness? Eight propositions are proposed and defended: 1) psychiatry is irrevocably grounded in mental, first-person experiences; 2) Cartesian substance dualism is false; 3) epiphenomenalism is false; 4) both brain-->mind and mind-->brain causality are real; 5) psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, and no more "spirochete-like" discoveries will be made that explain their origins in simple terms; 6) explanatory pluralism is preferable to monistic explanatory approaches, especially biological reductionism; 7) psychiatry must move beyond a prescientific "battle of paradigms" to embrace complexity and support empirically rigorous and pluralistic explanatory models; 8) psychiatry should strive for "patchy reductionism" with the goal of "piecemeal integration" in trying to explain complex etiological pathways to illness bit by bit.
Your browsing activity is empty.
Activity recording is turned off.
Turn recording back on