What Is Mental Disorder?

All of us either know someone with a mental disorder or suffer from one ourselves. In medical schools students are taught how to diagnose and treat them. But what exactly are mental disorders? Can we define them within a medical model, and are we justified in drawing a line between normal emotions and traits and disorders?

“Derek Bolton tackles the problems involved in the definition and boundaries of mental disorder. These problems are evident now in many contexts: in the diagnostic manuals themselves, in epidemiological estimates of prevalence, in distinguishing normal sadness from depressive illness, for example, or childhood temperamental traits from developmental psychopathology, and in mental health legislation and criminal law. In many ways these problems are contemporary expressions of those identified in the heated debates surrounding psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s: does psychiatry pathologize what is really normal life suffering? Is mental illness really social deviance, not a proper domain of medicine? Is psychiatry really a form of social control?”*

Derek Bolton is a professor of Philosophy and Psychopathology at KCL. He studied Moral Sciences at Cambridge University and proceeded to a doctorate in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He later trained in clinical psychology, and for many years held a clinical academic post at the IoPPN with clinical work at the Maudsley.

*(Quote from description of Prof Bolton’s book “What is Mental Disorder?”)

 

This event is brought to you by KCL PsychSoc, KCL Health + Humanities, and KCL PhilSoc.

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