Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:14:04.892Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Physical and mental illnesses: implications of similarities and differences for services and law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sean Roche
Sean Roche*
Affiliation:
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust King's College London, email [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

It appears self-evident that psychiatry should be classified as a particular specialty within the broader field of medicine. Psychiatrists, being first and foremost doctors, have undertaken an identical basic training to their physician and surgical peers and, as in general medicine and surgery, the biomedical model is a central pillar of psychiatric practice. Within psychiatry, signs and symptoms are elicited, diagnoses made and very often physical interventions (in the form of psychotropic agents) are employed. However, familiar institutional conventions can conceal the fact that psychiatry suffers from greater uncertainty regarding its conceptual foundations than other fields of medicine. In fact, the conceptual challenges arising within psychiatry are reflected in its thriving field of philosophy, and although there exists a dedicated philosophy of medicine, no other specialty is equal to psychiatry's breadth of conceptual debate.

Type
Guest Editorial
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 28 - 30
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2013

References

Bennett, M., Dennett, D., Hacker, P., et al (2007) Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bourget, D. & Chalmers, D. (2009) Philpapers survey, at http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl (accessed March 2003).Google Scholar
Boydell, J. & Allardyce, J. (2011) Does urban density matter? In Schizophrenia: The Final Frontier - A Festschrift for Robin M. Murray (eds David, A. S., Kapur, S. & McGuffin, P.), pp. 275–278. The Maudsley Series. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Chalmers, D. (2003) Consciousness and its place in nature. In Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind (eds Stich, S. & Warfield, T.), pp. 102–142. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clark, A. (2011) Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fulford, K. W. M. (1998) Dissent and dissensus: the limits of consensus formation in psychiatry. In Consensus Formation in Healthcare Ethics (eds ten Have, H. A. M. J. & Saas, H-M.), pp. 175–192. Philosophy and Medicine Series. Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Gazzaniga, M. & Steven, M. S. (2005) Neuroscience and the law. Scientific American Mind, 16, 44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghaemi, S. N. (2009) The rise and fall of the biopsychosocial model. British Journal of Psychiatry, 195, 3–4.Google Scholar
Lang, T. & Rayner, G. (2012) Ecological public health: the 21st century's big idea? BMJ, 345, 17–20.Google Scholar
Marmot, M. G., Allen, J., Goldblatt, P., et al (2010) Fair Society, Healthy Lives: Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England Post-2010. At http://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/projects/fair-society-healthy-lives-the-marmot-review (accessed March 2003).Google Scholar
McDowell, J. (1996) Mind and World. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McQueen, D. & St John Smith, P. (2012) Placebo effects: a new paradigm and relevance to psychiatry. International Psychiatry, 9, 1–3.Google Scholar
Panksepp, J. (2012) The philosophical implications of affective neuroscience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, 6–48.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K. (2010) The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.