3 ms·
Mapping the Human Phenome
- _delirium 17y agoThis is a pretty good take on the subject. The basic problem is that the science of psychiatry, like most sciences, can give you facts, not make normative judgments. If you want to know why one person is like one thing, and another person is like something else, science might be able to find out. But there is no scientific test to distinguish characteristics that are "normal" from those that are "illness", as the shifting classification of homosexuality makes painfully clear. It's a philosophical question, at root. The fact that we don't actually do the philosophizing, and instead "resolve" it by holding committee votes in the APA, is a bit of a problem, though.
- derefr 17y agoIt's neither a philosophical nor a scientific problem, because both of those professions deal in universally applicable theory. "Normality" is a sociological categorization—different societies will ascribe it to different people, for different reasons. The DSM is in the strange position of being akin to a prescriptivist dictionary—it tells society what words mean, and demands they use them that way. The more obvious route would be to have a descriptivist text that just finds, groups, and classifies sentiments that a given society already has about what it considers normal.
- _delirium 17y agoI can buy that, and the linguistic analogy is pretty interesting. I do think it's at least a plausible question to ask philosophically: is there a coherent concept of "mental illness" and came we come up with some criteria for it? But certainly the concept people use is a descriptive one: people who are really far outside the social conception of normality are almost universally considered mentally ill (many types of psychosis, for example), others are on the borderline, and others are universally considered normal.