Psychopathology: Minding mental illness

Abstract

This chapter deals with the two problems of mental illness that remains despite decades of analysis by philosophers and others. One is the problem of how something mental can be ill and the other is the problem of how an illness can be something mental. Numerous efforts by both psychiatrists and philosophers have been made to deepen the appreciation of what mental illness is like for those who suffer from it and to deploy such appreciation in characterizing the role of conscious representational content in mental illness. There is something both self and world immediately appear like to victims of mental illness. To fail to recognize this fact is to fail to be prototypically mindful of mental illness. The problems that appear in one guise or another in different places in the mental health literature include the discussions of philosophical counseling, the histories of concepts of mental health and illness, the cross-cultural analyses of mental illness, and the critiques of the over-medicalization of mental disturbance and distress.