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Biological Psychiatry and Normative Problems: From Nosology to Destigmatization Campaigns

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Medicine Studies

Abstract

Psychiatry is becoming a cognitive neuroscience. This new paradigm not only aims to give new ways for explaining mental diseases by naturalizing them, but also to have an influence on different levels of psychiatric norms. We tried here to verify whether a biological paradigm is able to fulfill this normative goal. We analyzed three main normative assumptions that is to say the will of giving psychiatry a valid nosology, a rigorous definition of what is a mental disease, and new tools for destigmatizing mentally ill patients. Although these different kinds of normativity are very heterogeneous, we must conclude that, in all these cases, biological psychiatry is a failure, in part because of a lack of epistemological conceptualization.

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Notes

  1. . Boorse's theses are very interesting here because his primary will was to develop a unitary concept of what is to have a disease. But he had to concede that his biostatistical conception of pathology may fail to integrate high prevalent and structural diseases which need special norms.

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Acknowledgment

Claude Debru, Dr. Norbert Paul, Aloïce Touzet.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and History of Sciences, University Paris 7 Denis Diderot, 22rue Esquirol, 75013, Paris, France

    Romain Schneckenburger

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  1. Romain Schneckenburger
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Correspondence to Romain Schneckenburger.

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Schneckenburger, R. Biological Psychiatry and Normative Problems: From Nosology to Destigmatization Campaigns. Medicine Studies 3, 9–17 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12376-011-0059-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12376-011-0059-3

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