BookVincenzo Di Nicola, Drozdstoj Stoyanov.
Summary: The field of academic psychiatry is in crisis, everywhere. It is not merely a health crisis of resource scarcity or distribution, competing claims and practice models, or level of development from one country to another, but a deeper, more fundamental crisis about the very definition and the theoretical basis of psychiatry. The kinds of questions that represent this crisis include whether psychiatry is a social science (like psychology or anthropology), whether it is better understood as part of the humanities (like philosophy, history, and literature), or if the future of psychiatry is best assured as a branch of medicine (based on genetics and neuroscience)? In fact, the question often debated since the beginning of modern psychiatry concerns the biomedical model so that part of psychiatry's perpetual self-questioning is to what extent it is or is not a branch of medicine. This unique and bold volume offers a representative and critical survey of the history of modern psychiatry with deeply informed transdisciplinary readings of the literature and practices of the field by two professors of psychiatry who are active in practice and engaged in research and have dual training in scientific psychiatry and philosophy. In alternating chapters presenting contrasting arguments for the future of psychiatry, the two authors conclude with a dialogue between them to flesh out the theoretical, research, and practical implications of psychiatry's current crisis, outlining areas of divergence, consensus, and fruitful collaborations to revision psychiatry today. The volume is scrupulously documented but written in accessible language with capsule summaries of key areas of theory, research, and practice for the student and practitioner alike in the social and human sciences and in medicine, psychiatry, and the neurosciences. Offers a critical survey of the history of modern psychiatry; Co-authors have dual training in scientific psychiatry and philosophy; Written in accessible language with capsule summaries of key areas of theory, research and practice; For students and specialists alike.
Contents:
Psychiatry in Crisis as a Medical Discipline
Methods for clinical evaluation in psychiatry: quantitative decomposition of narratives vs. qualitative approach. Reconstruction of the methodological discrepancies based on an exemplary case: major depressive disorder
Psychiatric nosology revisited: at the crossroads of psychology and medicine. Categorical vs. dimensional; nomothetic vs. ideographic classification and nomenclature; post-modern perspectives
Psychiatry and neuroscience: at the interface. How to incorporate scientific data from neuroscience without turning psychiatry into an applied branch of neurology
Invited commentary
Critical Psychiatry
The beginning of the end of psychiatry: a philosophical archaeology. Psychology: introspection and consciousness. Foundations of modern psychiatry. Schizophrenia: the worm in psychiatry's apple
The end of phenomenology. "Who killed Ellen West?" A critical review of Ludwig Binswanger's foundational case of existential analysis
The end of psychiatry. "Psychiatry against itself. " A philosophical archaeology of antipsychiatry
Invited commentary
Renewal in Psychiatry: Stoyanov in Dialogue with Di Nicola. Invited commentary
Afterword.