What is it about?
A common question when considering mental disorders is “are mental disorders natural or normative?” If they are ‘Natural’ this would mean they are real objective discoverable things in the world. If they are ‘normative’ this is usually taken to mean they are picked out from the rest of human behaviour because they are things we don’t value or see as ‘bad’ in some way. In this paper we argue that mental disorders can be seen as both natural and normative. They are natural in that they should refer to real tendencies/patterns in behaviour across people (focused on in a previous paper; Nielsen & Ward, 2018). But they are also normative because they are ‘bad’ for the sufferer. We explore how a pattern of behaviour can be both naturally and normatively defined by looking at something called the ‘deep continuity thesis’ found in 3e Cognition and similar views. Essentially this is an idea about how there can be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for organisms which live in a world of facts.
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Why is it important?
This article is important because it offers a new perspective in an on going debate about the nature of mental disorder. Particularly, are they out there in the world, or constructed by society because of what we do and don’t value in others? The position we offer moved beyond this dichotomous thinking. This move has implications for researchers, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and councillors in terms of the ethical justification for their practices.
Perspectives
I am excited about this paper for two key reasons. Firstly, it is the second paper in my PhD, and will serve an important role in my larger thesis project which considers mental disorder from a 3e perspective. Secondly, the work itself has a lot of potential. To count as a fully developed philosophical perspective in the area it needs more work (which I may not get to do during my PhD unfortunately). However, even in its current state I am proud of this idea. By bridging the natural and the normative such a concept has potential to cut through some of the entrenched positions in the area- highlighting the normative complexity for those who think mental disorders simply reflect broken brains, but without reducing mental disorders to myths or total constructions. Further, I think this outcome is achieved in a more simple fashion than some of the other ‘hybrid’ concepts of mental disorder.
Dr Kristopher Nielsen
Victoria University of Wellington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mental disorder as both natural and normative: Developing the normative dimension of the 3e conceptual framework for psychopathology., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, March 2019, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000118.
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