Conceptual Clarification: Mental Illness

Presumably one thing all of us are interested in is attaining some measure of conceptual clarity with regard to the concepts that are fundamental to the lexicon of bioethics and medical humanities. Of course Daniel does a wonderful job toward that end with his Medical Humanities Lexicon posts. Here my aim is a bit more modest as I'd simply like to note Christian Perring's helpful entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "mental illness:" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness/. Perring does a nice job of covering most of the fundamental questions intrinsic to the notion of mental illness and the manner in which we categorize and classify what comes under this rubric.

His bibliography is also quite good, indeed, I hope in the future to comment on a few of the titles found there. One conspicuous omission, however, is found near the end of the entry in the discussion of alcoholism. Perring rightly notes that "there has been a great deal of discussion of whether alcoholism should count as a disease, by physicians, philosophers, legal theorists and policy makers," proceeding to invoke Messrs. Watson, Mele, and Elster as exemplars of philosophical treatments that broach such subjects as "the irrationality of alcoholics, how to explain their symptomatic behavior, and to what extent they are responsible for their behavior." These are questions I've long been interested in, so I was a bit surprised to see that Perring did not mention, let alone cite, the work of one of my former teachers, Herbert Fingarette, author of a pioneering work on these issues, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). I'll be discussing Fingarette's arguments in a future post, but here I just want to give credit where it's due, and Fingarette richly deserves recognition for his seminal analysis of the aforementioned topics in the study of alcoholism. (For an introduction to Fingarette's work as a philosopher, see the appreciative collection of articles in Mary I. Bockover, ed., Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991])

Lastly, I should point out that Perring's entry on mental illness was penned before the appearance of a thought-provoking (thus recommended) book on same was published, Neil Pickering's The Metaphor of Mental Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Incidentally, this book is part of an excellent series of volumes that, again, I highly recommend: International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry published by Oxford Univerisity Press (and most if not all of which are available in paperback).

Comments

[Daniel Goldberg]

You are a fount of bibliographical information, Patrick. You are, however, causing my book budget to diminish at rapid rates!

[Janet]

Thanks for the good work you guys have done. If you decide to blog or post articles elsewhere please let us know.