Social Symptoms of Mental Disorder

Abstract

Diagnosing mental disorders involve several processes. However, it is common practice to judge if one is suffering from mental disorder by first looking for signs and symptoms in a person's social behavior. We call the symptoms “social symptoms” of mental disorder. Psychiatry tends to trace social symptoms back to the etiological factors of a mental disorder, but there is an inevitable paradox in this method. Similarly, while narrative therapy and social constructionism tend to claim that social symptoms are themselves the cause of mental disorders, that too leads inevitably to a second paradox. Realism, on which these methods are based, is the cause of such paradoxes.This paper explores the “Internal Observation Theory” -a theory that is independent of realism proposed by the biologist Yukio-Pegio Gunji in the study of mental disorders. The “Internal Observation Model”, or “Ontological Observation Model”, claims that the observer and the subject are inseparable since the subject is not free of influence from the observer. In this model, a turning point exists where universal observations (universal language games) are inferred from specific observations (specific language games). According to the theory, social symptoms can be taken as signs of mental disorder only within the workings of specific language games. In contrast, “realist theories” confuse specific language games with universal language games while trying to explain the cause of the symptoms. This paper aims to present a “Pegiotic deconstruction” of such a mistake and to propose internal observation as a means to avoid similar mistakes in the study of mental disorders.