Mind-Brain Dualism in Psychiatry: Ethical Implications

The Pernicious Effect of Mind/Body Dualism in Psychiatry

The purpose of this review is to clarify and demystify a set of ideas and assumptions, which pervade the field of psychiatry and cause confusion and unfortunate consequences for the practice and teaching of psychiatry. These crystalize in the so-called mind/body problem or mind/body dualism. Mind/Body dualism has adverse consequences for psychiatry, such as stigmatization of mental illness, res...

Early Career Scholars Conference in Philosophy of Psychiatry: Overcoming Mind-Brain Dualism in 21st Century Medicine

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton is a famous and beloved book. But its psychology, normal and abnormal, has always been derided as a humoral muddle. To decide whether he has anything to offer us today, I want to explore Burton’s use of the concept of disease in light of present day philosophy of science and medicine. Discussions within those disciplines employ four separate, or...

The ethical implications of forensic psychiatry practice.

The eye's mind: brain mapping and psychiatry.

possible to visualise living human brain structure and function in astonishing detail. To pioneering investigators such as Jackson, Meynert, Wernicke, Freud, Alzheimer and Kraepelin our current capacity to image brain structure to the nearest millimetre, and cerebral haemodynamics to the nearest second, would surely have appeared heaven-sent. With these techniques, they might have envisaged a c...

Dualism persists in the science of mind.

The relationship between mind and brain has philosophical, scientific, and practical implications. Two separate but related surveys from the University of Edinburgh (University students, n= 250) and the University of Liège (health-care workers, lay public, n= 1858) were performed to probe attitudes toward the mind-brain relationship and the variables that account for differences in views. Four ...